Old Border Road

by Susan Froderberg

  I see you’ve been taken in, Pearl says.

  She leans against the post in the shade of the paddock, tapping the ashes off the end of a slender cigar. The skin of her heart-shaped face and long slender neck is pale as milk, seeming never to have seen sun before—amazing, given this place—and her black hair is gathered into a knot at the nape. She smiles at me, showing perfectly even white teeth.

  Rose’s Daddy has promised me the foal, I tell her.

  Has he? she says, smiling bigger.

  I wait for her to say something more, but she doesn’t. She just looks at me and puffs on the little cigar, with the paddock, the pasture, the fencepost, the pecan tree, the ground, and the sky behind her all awaver, everything today seeming to be dissolving in the heat. There’s something intimidating about her that makes me feel trembly too, something about her that silences me, makes me want to fade quietly away, makes me want to overturn my words and hide. Maybe her knowing so much more than me, having gone off to a fancy college. That, and too, her having the courage to name herself her own name, and being brave enough not to care about what people say. Or maybe none of any of this. Maybe it’s not what I’ve heard about her, but instead what I see before me now—the way she holds herself, or the smell of her foreign-smelling perfume, or some aspect of her person I just can’t explain that makes me uneasy, too uneasy to speak.

  Holy Roller’s the name, Ham says.

  You take good care of our Holy Roller, Pearl says.

  It shall be, Rose’s Daddy says.

  We best be going, Ham says.

  You give our best to Rose now, Pearl says.

  That shall be too, Rose’s Daddy says.

  Tell her I hope to see her soon in church, Pearl says. You’ve heard about the Padre, haven’t you, the new one come to town?

  I heard about him and rode with him, he says.

  Yes, and I had a look and a listen for myself, she says. Let me tell you, that man is one hot gun.

  When you want that herd of ropin’ cattle here? Ham says.

  Anytime soon. And you shall be sure to cut any muleys out of the bunch. Muleys won’t do.

  You bet, Ham says. No muleys it’ll be.

  Ham backs the empty horse trailer up and pivots it around. Pearl gives a flutter of gloved hand and quickly rolls her window up before the boil of dust begins to roll inside the cabfront. I wave good-bye and turn to see the thoroughbred standing at the post and looking at me. I go over and hold my hand out to the animal, bursting with a feeling I have been struck dumb with of a sudden.

  Mornings and evenings now I go out to the pasture and wait for Holy Roller to spot me. When he does, he whickers and comes up to the fence. Sometimes I’ll have a pocketful of hay or a handful of grain to feed him, and I’ll let his violet-soft muzzle and nostrils graze the cup of my hand in the offering. Other times I give him nothing but mouthfuls of my words and strokes across the nose and the blaze. I want to have him for my own, want to own him and keep him, but the old man says that Pearl would never part with such a fine-paying horse. He is worth more than the affection of some lovestruck girl, he says.

  So I’m banking on the foal.

  I go into the tackroom and sit at Rose’s Daddy’s old wooden swivel chair, the afternoon light caging in through the barred window. I take a match from the box and strike it atop the metal desk. Then I make a wish, not waiting for any birthday, and lovestruck girl that I am, I blow the flame out.

  FOUR

  THE PADRE

  What we drink we get from the well, the same water hole dug out years ago by Rose’s Daddy’s daddy. What comes out of the pipes and the faucets is brackish and rust colored, the leech of ore or iron, of sulfur and selenium, and the other salts and elements drawn into it, people have said. Rose’s Daddy said no well dug anyplace else on the property would suit any of us any better. He said you had to learn to drink water differently around here, taking it down quickly and not taking breath in when you’re swallowing, even biting into a lemon wedge after the water is down, the way you would do it drinking tequila. He said you had to get used to the iron coloring staining everything too—the sinks and the tubs, the food you cook, the clothes you wear, the taint it leaves in your hair, on your fingernails, even your teeth. Still, the alchemy of the water in its mix with other liquids would catch the eye every time, the way the iron turned the old man’s bourbon dark as ink, and watching as he would drink his drink this way anyway, no matter the color or the odor or the taste of it. I would find him sitting out by the pool at night, his face reflected fluorescent, drinking his tall black cocktail, iced with iron-colored ice.

  Come sit and keep me company, Girl.

  I went over and took a seat next to him, pointing out the waterline, dropped feet below the paint of aquamarine.

  It’s turning into a wading pool, I said.

  Will be soon. Unless this fit of weather should go on forever.

  The ice tinkled in his glass like the tiny voices of frightened people.

  Girl, would you not be surprised to know that we sit atop an aquifer here? There is a pool lying right hither below where we recline tonight. At one time there were miles and miles of rivers and streams running underneath us. There were lakes. I would bet, a sea.

  Then there must be plenty of water.

  Heaven knows there was, he said. That is, before some of the bigger irrigators around here turned to groundwater supplies and began pumping with great intensity, and even more during the dry spells, with the river giving so little. The practice had our county and town near to exhausting its reserves, thereby putting the water-bearing stratum that upholds us close to collapse. If not for a double-hundred-mile-long aqueduct built and tapped into the river earlier dammed, such a catastrophe might have occurred. But the water was delivered, and life was brought back to the land. And we went on with our ways of plenty, our ways of wastefulness. Yet what we have now is groundwater dwindling in quality, as surely is our due. For our practices of feeding and planting are spoiling the aquifer below, mixed as it is with tailwater, with the seepage and runoff from the irrigate—an overload of pesticides and chemicals, and the metabolites and dregs that come from them. We need to bring the drainage up from the ground below our crop zones just so that it may be carried away from the very soil we want left fertile and of benefit.

  Yea, these be complicated matters, the old man said. If only it could be a simple case of pray and wait for the rain gods to replenish us.

  A giant striped mesquite bug sculled to and fro in a struggle for a way out of the pool. I thought about going over and scooping the thing up and putting it to the concrete to free it, but didn’t, figuring it too long a reach down to the water. Besides, my trying might have put a stop to the old man’s talk.

  There have been steel flumes and pipe siphons put into effect to draw the water up, he said. And there are concrete bypass drains thus laid to trough the water away. The reject water has been pumped out of the earth by the acre-foot and routed into the river, the river mix then channeled to a slough down in Mexico. But with a drought cast upon us, and our river water become so diminished, the undilute of saline and the undilute of all the rest of what ought not to be in the water is all that much the greater.

  Rose’s Daddy took a sip of his icy black drink.

  Lo, man was born unto trouble, he said. For indeed Mexico protests, as surely anyone could predict the way that story would go, as her need is for water, not waste. And as we wait to come to some new accordance, all the while the ribs and the veins of the earth are being sucked of the nutrients so needed for nourishment. Perhaps our harvest days are past.

  He brought the glass to his lips and drank again.

  There is talk these days of building a desalting plant, he said. Seems there be ever more devices of the crafty. Yet such a fix is as costly as it is cumbersome, near impossible in times tough as these. All the meanwhile, the thirst of the cities on the coast becomes more difficult to quench, what with the ever-growing number of peop
le in need of a drink and a wash. As that mass of people increases, so will the power of their dollar and the demand for their share. And such tender becomes ever more enticing.

  The mesquite bug reached the side of the pool and finally began to climb.

  So how be it we are to give what we have so little of to give? he said. Do we go on breaking treaties? Or do we do what a man does best, and just go out and get? What do you think, Girl, are we truly our brother’s keeper?

  Rose’s Daddy put the glass to his lips, drawing this time but a long draw of air.

  IT’S THE KNOCKING of a pecker bird that spurs me to morning, a drum call that opens my eyes to the light spilling in through the cuts of the blinds. Son is already up and gone to town—I can hear him telling me this now, hear him telling me he is leaving as I’m already drifting back under a cover of sleep. I resist the ought-to’s, the should-be’s, the prods of duty that would make me throw the sheet off and get up out of bed. It’s not until the knocking stops, in the loud silence that follows, that I’m roused to the other side and waked to the day. I’m waked again to yes, waked to those hopes that are a pull forward, whatever it is that gets dawned upon us—some kind of betterment or remaking we come to believe in, what it might be that makes us try. For if not striving, what might there be but tedium?

  I rub the crust from my eyes, trying to arrange the pieces of the night I’ve just risen from, remembering now the manila envelope arrived in yesterday’s mail, remembering the sentences of intent to be written out, the many pages to be inked in, the categories and the summaries of me needing ordering, and all the questions answered properly and sealed up and sent for judgment by a soon-to-come date.

  Answer: To make something of myself.

  Answer: For myself.

  Answer: Not applicable.

  I reach for the cord and pull the blinds open more and full light breaches in. Objects are drawn forward—lampshade, bureau, armchair, mounds of clothes from the night prior, toppled boots, balls of socks, a snaking of belt, a glinting of silver, islets of underthings, a daddy longlegs coursing daintily over a pair of denims. A glass sits on the table next to the bed, but the water left in it is too scummed with dust to drink. I lick my parched lips, swallow dry spittle. I yawn to make the ringing stop, now in the already rising timbaling of cicada—those mightily vocal tiny invertebrates in some great state of proclaim.

  The cool tiles send the blood running upward. Lost parts of what came to me in sleep crop up—a skitter of images, fragments of sentences, strands of nonsense, the whole of it as hopeless as trying to hold on to a handful of water. Memory breaks away from the dream as I hear Rose’s Daddy talking yesterday about breakfasting out today and see the look on his face of being somewhere else, the way he bit at his lower lip and put his hat on and walked away in a direction not intended, the way he stopped and muttered something before turning around. He and Son are by this hour at the coffee shop, likely settled into the middle booth of their regular choosing, ordering their eggs and their biscuits and gravy, their bacon crispy, their oranges squeezed at the asking. A starchy light will flood in through the window where they sit blowing the hot off just-poured cups of coffee. The old man will put his cup down and begin to explain the aims and the means of selling blocks of the property off, selling land attached to water rights that so up the sum of the profits. They will nod, one to the other. They will chew their food slowly, deliberately, turning occasionally to look out the window, noting each pickup truck that pulls up in front, knowing every man that gets out, suspicious of every man they don’t.

  Reach some more of that hot sauce over, one of them will say.

  I splash the rust-colored water over my face, holding my breath as I do to shut the sulfur odor of it out. I brush the brush through, and my hair crackles and sparks in the starving-for-water air here.

  The hour strikes late morning time.

  I ready myself with a different breath for the pouring scorch that awaits. Then to add startle to startle, opening the door to step out, I find a diamondback laid choked on the welcome mat, and there alongside it, trails of guts and dust prints trailing off the porch, sure marks of a hunter cat. I scoot to the side of the catch, my eyeballs constricting in their adjusting to the sun’s rays, my shadow creeping over the remains. I head down the steps and around back toward the tackroom, on into a morning like every morning here is, one hard to tell from any other one, in what’s become a consistent and cloudless lack of variation, in a land of forever seeming but one season, where everything is the same and still, where the stretch from here to the outlines of foothills is as bleak and empty and colorless as any loneliness would be. The sun rings above like an alarm in the heat. I can already feel it eating through the weave of my hat. I head for shade, finding the shelter of the melon shed along the way to be an oasis, the old dog there splayed out on the concrete floor, apant in her sleep. She lumbers up and shakes when she knows me near, and I squeeze my eyes shut at the dust that floats up from her coat. Again pieces of the night arise—a lake it was, woods, a stream, back from where I was from, and I’m trying to find the true place I know to get the feelings right that I had had there once. Why do those people keep getting in my way? I know I must know them. But who could they be? And why do they keep me from getting close to the shore?

  A pair of boots waggle out from beneath the watertruck. A chafing of rough cloth sounds against the cement, and the hired man comes crawling out from the underbelly, crablike, on his back. He reaches for his cap and doffs it at me. Mornin’, Missus, he says. I good-morning him back, feeling it alien to hear me as Missus when I am just turned eighteen.

  The hired man gets up and lifts the hood of the watertruck, and thick folds of dust sift out of the nooks and the cracks of it when he does. You should see the way the sun has burned through the paint of the thing, the way it has worn the tank and cabtop down to sand prime, eaten right through to the metal core in places. The sun bakes through everything, and with it comes a heat that brings the smells out, the smells of motor grease and diesel oil, of pumps and valves, weldings and fittings.

  I fan myself with my hat and go on.

  A military jet moves past in a thunder overhead, leaving behind a contrail that furrows the sky. I try picturing what the pilot might see from up in the cockpit—the warp and scar of burnt earth below—and how it will be to arrive soon to the blue of the sea in the distance, landing to rollicking calls of seabirds and cooling wind bursts, squinting into the glitter of water, tasting the taste of salt on the lips.

  The pecker bird rattles on a hollowed-out old saguaro, waking me back again to here where I am. Here where I am, you should see it: the pastureland within desertland, the ballenas of fields and broken ground, the alkali and creosote flats beyond that, and the slopes we know as angles of repose—those places of hanging on while falling apart, places of perfect tension and friction.

  I get to the pasture gate and give a kick to a post to shoo away the crowbirds rowed along the fencerail, and they scatter and caw, their cries angry and rising like razors from their gulars. One swoops down and strikes the hat off my head and I quick pick it up and hurry on into the tackroom, the blood running prickly through my veins, my thoughts running through causes for punishment.

  The tackroom is dim and musty inside. Bars of sunlight filter in with the dust through the little iron-guarded window. I sit at Rose’s Daddy’s old gun-colored metal desk, old as one of the world wars would be, with the fan in a slow whir overhead. I pull one of the drawers open, hoping to find something hopeful I suppose, or maybe a thing intended to settle mystery, though what would I be looking for? All there are, are locks and buckles and screws inside, a box of toothpicks, books of matches, scatters of coins. I close the drawer and lean back in the chair and look about the room, at the nailed and studded walls covered over, as they are, with an assortment of montura and tack. The place is everywhere draped with stiff ropes and stirrups, bridles and reins, harnesses and spurs, flourishes of headsta
lls and straps, peggings of leather riggings, worn old chaps, cracked hames, unknowable leather things. A row of sawhorses holds the saddles up, each seat perched atop a beam of its own, the stirrups penduled in the strew and dredge of dirt and straw that cover the boarded floor over, the cinches sagged in the nubble and scatter of droppings from mouse and verdin and squirrel. Along the shelves are saddle soaps and leather balms, ointments and liniments, and other kinds of creams and potions that promise to heal and mend. A bottle of whiskey is empty but for a swig. I pick it up and see the current list of rodeo events that were weighted beneath—the dates and the fees, the sums of the prizes, how to qualify to ride.

  So the old man wasn’t kidding.

  I had come running into the tackroom day before yesterday to escape the racket of target practice and to ask the old man why Son was so often at it lately with this game. Son had been out blowing tin cans off the fencepost again, and I stood behind him awhile, watching the way he cleared the lineup. He spent a round of bullets on a row of empty cola bottles he had set up in the dirt. He reloaded and looked about him, as if for what would be next. He looked at me. Then he turned and started shooting at almost everything. He shot at a desert weasel slinking field hole to field hole. He shot at a chuckwalla dropped from the jaws of one of the hunter cats, and then he spun around and started shooting at the cat. He kept on like a crazy man, firing at just about anything—at a birdrunner running along the road, at a spiny berry noded to a cholla, at a sandspout funneling along a bar ditch. He had smoke pockets drifting off into the forenoon above us like a hover of blue doves.