The old puncher reaches an arm toward me to take note of, and I’m made to look. He just as quick takes the arm away and uses it to shake a fist as a rider in a big-brimmed felt jumps out of the pen gate. The puncher hollers out to the rider, Hold hard to the apple, man! But the rider too soon hits the ground in a blowup of dust. The pickup men ride in fast and nab the riderless animal, the horse still folding and kicking, until one of the pickups catches the strap at the horse’s flank to release it, the other man fogging the bronc back into the pen. The fallen rider rises slowly, uses his big-brimmed felt to brush the dust from his chaps, and he hobbles off, every bit of gesture done high-cowboy style.
Gives me the mulligrubs anymore just looking at them guys limping back to the gates, the old puncher says. Here we go for the next go, he says, elbowing me, and we watch as the horse is readied in the box, and the chutegate opens, and the bucking and the leaping and the yips and the shouts start up all over again.
THE SUN IS already in a rage overhead by the time the day’s first water-run is done. I put dried beans in a pot to soak and fill the waterbowl up to full for the dog, stopping to check that the stove-burners are off before heading out into the pouring morning scorch. I walk along the walkway, the flowerbeds that border it now littered with the bones of picked-over gophers, and the feathers of oily old crowbirds, and the dried and coiled skins of lizards and snakes. One of the hunter cats scratches at a creeping thing yet crawling in the weeds. I scoot the cat away, and it scrambles off the porch and takes off out across the burnt grass of the hummock. I’m thinking it’s some kind of semiprecious stone or globular mineral I’ve come upon, but when I stoop down I find the heart of a tiny critter left in the dirt, the muscle of it turned dark and hard as an agate. I pick it up and feel the leathered feel of it. I drop it into my pocket and go on. I think to give the tiny heart to the Padre, to make up for the things that haven’t been said properly between us.
A couple of the other hunter cats lie panting in the shade out in the melon shed. The old dog’s dusty old tail protrudes from beneath the watertruck. She scoots out from under when I get in and start the engine. I let it idle a minute, the old dog standing beside, her tongue aloll and panting in rhythm to piston and cylinder. I sit and take the familiar smell of the cabfront in, the solidly good thing about the watertruck that it emits. Was it my grandfather’s lap I sat in? Or was that my father? Was it a truck, or a jeep kind of vehicle? I’m in a spell of talking to the Padre about what I feel right now. I’m wondering at the long ago, trying to explain to him the way days past will follow us place to place, even into the unlikely. I’m saying, how much of it can even be called validity, our so-called memories? Things and feelings I can’t be sure of or remember well enough to tell, but I tell them anyway because they are known deeply and have shaped me, and so must truly be. And the Padre will take my hand and squeeze it, understanding me, agreeing.
Go on now, I say, clutching into reverse.
The old dog stops her panting with a clap of the jaw and she trudges off.
I head down the rutted road with dwarves of dust trailing behind the watertruck. By midday these forms will grow giant and spiraling, until they are watered over again come evening. I throttle down and head straight up onto the mesa, the watertruck chugging steadily up the steep. The road at the top follows a meander scar, filled these days with but slickrock and sediment, the flood of sideriver long disappeared from it. The road veers away from the old channel and comes to a lake-size hollow in the ground, a pan layered in mineral and what they call loess and varve. All about is nothing but dun-colored, wide-open country, a cloudless and contourless land, ravaged by sun, and with little shelter from the savage rays but for those few patches and folds of shadow, the occasional safety of dwelling and shade, and then certainly the cover and refuge of dark to come that follows day’s end. Where is the romance and glory that you can find in your ordinary western story? It’s more drypan and cinderplain here, more brimstone, more empty, more punishing—more everything and nothing here.
I turn off onto gravel section line and from here drive through what were once miles and miles of lush groves, now all of it gone to acre after acre of dying trees—lemons and oranges mostly, some exotics such as tangelos and mineolas and tangerines. The stands are long bared, changed from evergreen to failing, the leaves dropped from stalks and twigs, the once ever-emerald blades gone from glossy to dirt colored and brittle as crickets fallen to skirt the roots, bare spurs and branches reaching upward like outspread hands begging for rain. Some of the fruit on the dead trees are persistent, shrunken, leathern, and yet attached. There were old families here that owned these groves. Not so long ago, when people had money. When people had water. When people had important names.
The watertruck rumbles along. The gravel section line ends at the escarpment and winds in a dirt road down the steep incline back to the valley. The river lies thin and shimmery below, a silvery necklace chain. I clutch and gear down and roll the window up to keep the dust at bay, and at the bottom of the hill I turn onto the main road, putting me now at the opposite end of town, having arrived to it the roundabout way. A man, doused hat to boots with dust, stands wearied at the roadside with a thumb out, but I keep on. I glimpse him in the rearview mirror, see him taking the hat off and turning to look back at me, making me take a look at myself. And I wonder, as might not he, what it is about us that makes us look at all, or not look, makes us stop, or go on.
In little more time I’m come to the church. I pull into the lot and find a crosshatch of shade under an old mesquite, where a flock of top-knotted little quail are sent ascatter into the apache plume. The sun peals overhead. The rays burn through my clothes. Heat rises through my boot soles. I walk across the lot in the best hurry the hot allows and enter the reprieve of the sanctuary. There’s an unoccupied coolness inside, an easy stir of fans above. A powdery light pours in through the windows. I take the smell of leather and varnish in, the mustiness of old wool coming from who knows where or why there might be wool around here, an odor of dying flowers, although there be none upon the altar today. I walk down the aisle again, toward the tall wooden cross on the wall behind the altar, past the rows of wooden pews and the padded knee benches, past Bibles and songbooks bracketed on the pew-backs. A song from the wedding day plays inside my head. The wrong song. I will admit to it again.
To be betrothed.
To be be-truthed.
I put my hand into my pocket, finger the hard tiny heart, and walk on, going out the sidedoor of the church and across the church lot to the church house. I knock on the door, hear the voice say to come in. I open the door as the Padre rises from the chair behind his desk. He’s dressed in a long white garment, not of the Indian kind this time, but something other. The room smells of coffee and books and ladies’ perfume. In the visitor’s chair in front of the Padre’s desk sits Pearl’s daughter, Pearl, source of perfume. The Padre stands looking at me, with both hands on the desk. Daughter Pearl cranes her neck back and looks my way too. Her hair is pulled back with a wide red headband. She grips the arms of her chair with her elbows winged back to prop herself into position, and I’m seeing one of those ropy-necked sandhill cranes out in the fields, with their plumage outstretched during their courting and mating games. Who knows what shows on my face, thinking this. She gives me a tight half smile back that says she knows something that I’ve not been privileged to. Or she would like me to believe.
Had I known you were coming, the Padre says.
I shouldn’t have come, I say.
Wait, he says.
Daughter Pearl keeps with her bird pose and the smile closed tight.
Really, no, I ought not to have…
Jesús appears behind me at the door.
Lo siento, Padre, he says.
No problema, Jesús.
During the clumsiness and exchange I can turn and slide by Jesús and go hurrying down the hallway, my heart galloping ahead, passing room after empty room—a playroom filled with ch
ildren’s things, a meeting room of folding chairs, a kitchen of sorts where elderly women are usually seen shuffling about in the steam. I go out the door of the church house and cross over the pebbly walkway, stepping head-on into a cluster of buckeyes that flutter about the nopal. I fan them away from my face in a panic and hurry into the church. Take a seat in a pew at the back. Gather myself. Try to breathe evenly. What am I to say? Find the words and harness them. Try. I sit in the vaulted shadow of arches and beams, see the Padre leaving Daughter Pearl in her seat, his needing to go after me to find me. Wait. Try to think of what I came to tell him. Will I be able to say it the way I had thought to? Then let him speak. Give him a chance to tell me our story. I sit with an aching growing between my shoulder blades, just holding myself upright suddenly turning to work. Why does he take his time? Just wait. Maybe apologizing to her for the interruption. He won’t be long, he tells her. He will be here in a minute to put everything right again. We will try. He was nervous, he will tell me, confused. You are young, he will say, and didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how to guide me. He will explain what it was that happened to us that night, tell me what’s happening now. He will explain it all. For wasn’t there friendship between us? And most of all, love, love between us, wasn’t there love? he will say. Who else but you, who other than me, is there really to talk to? I sit in the pew, my body sinking into itself with a heaviness of not belonging, a loneliness more deep than I could ever know the where or the why of. Yes, how those yesterdays can deform.
Light flickers in the doorway. But it’s Jesús who comes in and starts down the aisle. When he sees me sitting here he nods and turns back to go out the way he came in. All right, Jesús will tell the Padre where he can find me. Give him time to get the message, give him time to come out. I sit in the silence. I sit in the falsity, sit in the wrong. I wait. I wait a long time. The light beaming in through the windows fades and dims. Birds shriek outside in the trees. I get up and walk down the aisle, open the door, go out. A lone cloud hangs in the sky.
A cloud.
I take it as a sign of some kind.
SHE HAD COME back down from the North with a new quarter horse. The animal she brought with her was intelligent and built to run, and Daughter Pearl had the whole time away been working him as she should. Now she watches her father back the heavy-rumped animal out of the horse trailer. He bridles the horse and leads him to the post and tethers him. Son fetches the saddle, made special and light for winning and with a rounder skirt to allow the horse more go, and he swings it up and sits it squarely atop the racing pad set between withers and loin, tightening the girthstrap after. He stands to admire the saddle for a time, the wide pommel meant to accommodate a woman’s thighs, the horn thin to better fit a woman’s grip. He rubs his hands over the new leather. He studies the ornately carved silver that decorates the breastplate. He tugs at the tie-downs to check the fit. He hollers into the tackroom to fetch the bell-boots, and Daughter Pearl comes out with them, and together they put the rubber protectors on.
The hired man saddles up and readies the paint. There you be, Missus, he says to me.
Ham flips the breaker switch in the cooling light of dusk, flooding the arena with spectacle light. Ride those animals about and warm them up before we start, he says. And take yer time of it, he says, as we got plenty of it. The evening’s still giving yet.
The paint’s warmed up, I say.
Daughter Pearl mounts the quarter horse and trots him out, her long braids flapping up and down on her back in a steady rhythm, the horse not breaking time when it lifts its tail to drop a load that leaves a trail of steaming lumps in the dust. Son tosses his rope to a fencepost and sends a row of grackles, their cries like whining bedsprings, rising outward in a spray over the arena, where the hired man works to roll the barrels into place. By the time the barrels are set, Daughter Pearl has ridden back with the quarter horse beginning to ribbon with sweat.
Let’s see who be the first to go, Ham says.
He flips the coin and she let’s me call it.
All right, querida, he says, you’re on.
Daughter Pearl sidles the horse to the ready mark. She pats the crest and leans forward and mutters some words to steady the animal. She looks over to her father. Be on yer mark, he says. Git set. And he whips the flag down as Son thumbs the timer to a start.
The horse comes out in a flash and she runs him at all-out speed, entering the first pocket and setting the horse up to make the turn, her legs hugged about the ribcage, her hand on the pommel, horse and rider both tipped on edge and rounding the barrel easily. She sets up for the next barrel and runs it tight, going the opposite way this time, looking into the turn, then aiming ahead and onward for the third barrel, taking it with not a wobble or a touch, and at this she lets the head go, running the horse like all get-out for home.
She reins the horse to a stop and it rears in a great explosion of dust.
Fifteen seconds! Son says. He gives a whistle of approval.
That’s what you got to beat, he says, looking at me.
I turn my head to spit the bile taste out of my mouth that has worked its way up from my stomach into the back of my throat. I look at the paint’s withers and check to see if the quivering is in him or in me.
On your ready, Ham says. I stand the line, the paint champing at the bit and tossing his head. I nod at Ham and he gives the count and cuts the air in a whip of the flag. The paint leaps out and off into a run, and I lean forward over the shoulders and let the head go. I suck my gut in and round my back and lift up out of my body to make myself light so the horse is free to glide through the course and do what he was made to do, all the while feeling the great fury of machine beneath me—hooves pounding and mounting heat, the lungs blowing loud and coarse as storm wind, nostrils flaring, girth heaving—my bootheels awhump against the hide, my arms stretched in a reach out toward the top of the animal’s head, fence and posts and trees blurred and streaming by, my heart pounding hard and fast as hooves in the same race. I rein out but not too wide, and we turn the money barrel tight and I let the head go again for the distance of the second, rounding that barrel easily too, and now on to the last, but no, the head goes high and the horse is too soon thinking about the out and not seeing the barrel we’ve come to—too close, felt it, my boot hitting metal, but keep going, keep on round the third, don’t look back, stay the course, a straight line now, just run full out, and my heart pounding out the meter to go on run run go on run.
I rein back hard at the cross of the line. The paint blows and snorts and tosses his head, and I let him circle and prance for the cool-down.
I felt it wobble.
You done toppled it, Son says. He shakes his head, turns away.
Ham looks at the watch and adds the seconds on. But otherwise you run it in good time, he says. Next time.
Son stays quiet.
Daughter Pearl sits her quarter horse and smiles her smile.
THERE WAS A showdown come sundown. It started when Son told me that Ham told him there was a soon-to-start date for the building of the desalting plant. Son told me he aimed to apply for a job. Before it’s too late, he said, and all the work is took up by others hungry for it. He told me about plans to lay fifty-something miles of bypass drain intended to carry the reject water away. It’ll be a good long project and employment to count on for a spell of time, he said. I know I could run a backhoe easy as making pancakes. I said to him, You’ve never made a pancake in your life. He stood and looked at me. I looked back at him, trying to see what I used to see.
Things are about to change, he said. Ham has offered to buy the place to help us out, old adobe house and all, and I’m ready as hell to sell the entire getup, he said. I’m happy to have it go to Ham. He’s family.
Family, I said.
I’ve got us in mind to go and buy a nice double-wide with the profit we can make, he said. We’ll set up along the riverside in the middle of a good stand of cottonwood. Get us some ric
h pasture for the horses. Put some time into riding. I’ve a yearning to go into rodeo’ing professionally, he says. Start out as a sideline until I’m into the bigtime. I know I’d be good.
The wind whined down the chimney flue.
C’mon, we could have us a real nice place that isn’t the work to care for it is here. I’ll even put you in a garden if you should want me to do it.
A garden.
Once the rain comes. It always comes. It don’t stay like this forever. Anyways, you got to think ahead. And my plan is to take life easy for a change, as it oughten to be taken. I’ll get me days of nine-to-five and ride nights, honing my skills at the ranch rodeos, keeping myself in the ready for the big shows. Darlin’, I’m hearing coins jingling in my pockets. I’m seeing bills to be padding my wallet fat again.
I said something about time enough off for the keeping of his important evening hours in town, and the ways he might find there to spend the money he sees coming in. He said something meant to hotshot me back. And then there were words—words stored up and ready to fire for the longest time, words spit out like bitter seeds, words flung out recklessly and said too many times by too many people in too many fights, words that I will not go on about here for the shame of the sameness of them.
Our voices hit higher decibels. One of us walked off to another room and then the other one did. Doors were slammed. The old dog put her tail between her legs and slinked out of the way, looking for out. I thought for the dog’s sake and stopped hollering. Son went to the front door and opened the screen, and she scooted past and off into a trot. I sat and stared at the wall, as if there were something to be read in the wallpaper of it. My way of putting a halt to the quarrel was to quit talking at all. Son’s way was to tell me he had best get on to the tending of his business in town.
I peeked in through the crack of the open door of the bathroom. Son stood in front of the bathroom mirror with a comb in his hand, trying to get his hair to go just right. He combed the hair all over to one side, as if to tame it, then went and combed it all back the other way. He took his time making the part, making the line of it precise. He raked all the hair forward and made the line again. He combed the fullest section of it over, and the little bit of it down and to the side. He kept trying to work the wave along his forehead out. He wet the teeth of the comb with water and ran the comb through the wave. He pressed the wave flat with his hand. He cursed and threw the comb into the sink. He cursed once more, picked the comb up, and started combing his hair this way and that all over again. I waited for him to come out. I waited for him to see me standing here and quiet, and for him to say he’s changed his mind. When he came out, his hair was wet and pressed into place, his mouth contrary, and he didn’t look at me at all. He went over to the rack and reached for his hat, and after all the fuss with his hair, he put the hat atop his head. Saying nothing and not glancing back, he opened the door and left.
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