Waitresses moved among the patrons with painted clay pitchers and fresh plates for the buffet. A young Indian girl with braided hair displayed a fabric board on which earrings and pendants of silver and turquoise were fastened, petitioning each of the diners and then each of the bar patrons in turn, and when she came in her circuit to Lottie on her barstool, she passed without a glance.
When at last Lottie left for the women’s toilet, she returned to find her bottle missing and her seat taken. She stood in the archway of the cantina and regarded the buffet and the women in their dark skirts and embroidered blouses tending and replenishing it. The surrounding tables were all yet occupied and other townsfolk late arriving stood vigil in the corners and aisles and out in the hallway, chatting and waiting to eat.
She passed through the lobby, the music fading behind her. Outside the hotel, the shadows had lengthened and the plaza had all but emptied. She walked a slow circuit, past the open storefronts and the lingering strollers, past the last of the Indian women banded where they sat in bars of light and shadow.
Before the empty bandstand was a bench, and beside the bench an iron trash can rimmed with pigeons that scattered, fluttering, at her approach. She found there among the papers and wrappers and other refuse of the day a stiff tortilla smeared with cold frijoles that she carried to the bench and ate quickly, tossing the papery crumbles to the pigeons that circled her with bobbing heads, harrying one another for her scatterings.
When she’d finished eating, she closed her eyes to listen. To the cooing of the pigeons and the flit and trill of smaller birds. To the dolorous tolling of the church bells. To the cars and buses rumbling in the street. And when she opened them again, she saw white clouds banked in towering drifts over the stunted towers of the cathedral.
Down the path by which she sat, an old man bent and lifted a guitar and placed some copper coins in its open and battered case, as though rewarding himself for this small labor. He plucked strings and twisted pegs on the headstock, his ear lowered to the tuning, and when he straightened again, he nodded gravely in her direction and played a showy flourish.
Lottie smiled, and the man smiled in return.
Pigeons flew as she stood. The man sat with his legs crossed and his eyes closed, his music haunting and tragic, his fingers on the fretboard the languid remembrance of a lover’s caress. Lottie stood for a long time listening, and when she turned and started again toward the hotel, the music stopped.
Joven, the man said. Espérate.
He bent to the guitar case and picked out a penny and pressed it into her hand. Go with God, he told her in English, and then he settled back and closed his eyes and resumed his mournful song.
The cantina was all but empty. The buffet table had been cleared and the bandstand stood vacant under colored lights and the few patrons who remained amid the wash pails and the bustling charwomen were hunched and smoking at the bar. The new bartender wore a thick mustache and glanced at Lottie in the archway and dismissed her with a toss of his wrist.
She roamed the hotel hallways like a shadow, and like a shadow left no impression on what or whom she passed. The shopwindows all were darkened now, the fireplaces lit. In the courtyard off the lobby, a woman sat cross-legged on the rim of a tiled fountain, her foot tapping, her cigarette glowing and fading and glowing again in the slanting half-light as laughter echoed down from an upstairs window.
Lottie sat in an alcove by a telephone. The telephone was tall and black and sat in its tiled nicho like some Bakelite icon wanting only for a votive. She lifted the handle and listened, but nobody was talking.
People passed by in the hallway. Some were couples arm in arm, and some were men in low conversation. Two women wearing aprons, giggling. A Mexican boy sweeping.
She dozed. Then a man appeared and startled her awake, frowning and gesturing toward the telephone, and she rose and hurried past the man and past the reception desk and past the empty cantina, entering again into the women’s toilet, where she vomited into the sink.
The plaza lay in darkness. She breathed the cool night air and smelled the piñon woodsmoke, pausing in vain to listen for the old man’s guitar.
She was very much alone.
She retraced her afternoon promenade, the docked hair and gangling gait of Johnny Rae Montgomery trailing her by lamplight in the black and empty storefronts. Moving like the hour, or like the declination of solstice, and the stone obelisk in the center of the plaza some ancient nodus by which to chart the course of her movement.
In the back of the Buick she found a saddle blanket, and in the front she lay curled beneath the steering wheel, her eyes closed and her hand splayed at her cold and naked throat.
And there she wept.
When Palmer emerged blinking into the new sunlight, his face was freshly shaved and his barbered hair was parted and slicked with pomade. He brushed his hat as he scanned the curbline, his eyes lighting on Lottie where she sat upright and rigid in the front seat of the Buick.
Where’ve you been? he asked as he slid behind the wheel. I been lookin all over.
She turned her face to the street.
Don’t you start with me. I told you I’d be a while.
He turned the ignition and released the brake and wheeled the Buick sharply into the street. They’d circled the block, past the stone cathedral and the little park beside it, and they were heading west along the river before either spoke again.
I’m hungry, she said quietly.
Well, what do you know. She can talk after all.
The café huddled in the shade of an ancient church with buttressed walls and a leaning bell tower whose shadow threw a long and crooked cross onto the cobblestones before it. Lottie ordered doughnuts and coffee while Palmer sat smoking and watching the morning strollers pass through the rippling cruciform, ceremonial in their transit, as communicants might walk in some ritual passage from shadow into sunlight.
He spoke without facing her. He told her of the men he’d met in the game, and of their advice to him that the land he sought and the life he’d described lay three hundred miles due north, in the mining town of Durango.
Silver is crashed and the mines is shut and they’s givin away land for a song, he said, his eyes shifting in the plate glass. Horses everywhere, turned out to forage and free for the takin. Plus the bank’s been run, so the whole town’s full of men got their life savings buried in coffee cans and nothin to do but drink and play at cards all day and wait for the mines to reopen.
Sounds like you’d fit right in.
He gave her a look.
I thought you said we was gonna meet him here.
Palmer stubbed his cigarette. Oh, yeah. He patted his pockets, palming out the pack. That’s the other reason we need to head north. Word is that’s where your daddy’s gone.
She turned away.
Now what?
She shook her head.
He tapped out a cigarette, watching her. Come on, let’s have it.
You don’t act like you want to find him, that’s all.
Ah, hell. He lit the smoke and leaned back in his chair and picked tobacco from his lip. Guess I didn’t realize you was so partial to Bible-thumpin and belt-whippins.
She didn’t answer.
Well?
He’s my daddy, that’s all.
Palmer stood from his seat and probed his pocket and sprinkled some coins on the table.
Tell you what. I ain’t your daddy, but I ain’t your goddamn enemy neither. Now you got yourself a choice to make. Either you stay here where you think he’s at, or you come with me to where I know he’s at. I’ll leave that to you.
He leveled his hat as he pushed through the door and passed in the window before her.
She sat. She watched the cobblestone street and the tilted rood-shadow and the figures passing beneath it. A woman adorned in turquoise. A young priest from the chapel. A trio of stooped crones in black mantónes, so alien to her in their language and dress.
&n
bsp; She thought about Palmer. Of the night just passed, and of those without number yet to come. And she thought of her father, alone and hunted and on the run.
She stood and crossed to the door.
They drove through the pueblo towns of Tesuque and Nambé, through a rolling landscape of cedars and piñons and mud hovels and dark and ragged children tending goat strings in the weedy roadside barrancas. They crossed the Rio Grande outside Española, New Mexico, and there the pavement ended and the roadway forked and they stopped to provision at a roadside bodega, its walls of brown mud and its portal stippled by the gnarled and ancient cottonwoods whose seed chaff fell like pixie snow on the Buick where she waited.
By noon they’d crossed the Rio Chama, climbing steeply into a landscape of sandstone bluffs and low mesas where ravens flew and pronghorn antelope rose up and scattered before their rattling dust cloud, and thence into the land-grant village of Abiquiu.
From there the roadway parted a breathtaking tableau of tumbled boulders and red-rock cliffs that glowed in the high desert sun like slag metal in a forge, all of it revealed under a blue sky limned to the east by the darker blue tumescence of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, which Palmer told her meant the Blood of Christ and marked the start of the fabled Rockies.
After three more hours of dust and jarring roadway they’d forded the Canjilon and the Cebolla Rivers, where the gravel resumed and the landscape flattened, and by nightfall they’d crossed and recrossed the Old Spanish Trail and glimpsed in the broad valley below them, like the council fires of some nomadic people, the lights of Tierra Amarilla.
They parked the smoking Buick in the last light of sunset with the jagged dogteeth of the San Juan Mountains glowing pink on the near horizon, their rocky peaks etched with the threads and arrowheads of a late-winter snow.
They stood down and stretched, and Palmer spat, and together they reconnoitered their surroundings. The car sat on a low promontory with an irrigation ditch gurgling and sucking below the grade. Barbed-wire fencelines framed the road course and ran to infinity in both directions.
I reckon this is as good a spot as any, Palmer said.
They built a cookfire of gathered sticks and ate their beans and bacon wrapped in charred tortillas. Palmer sat cross-legged, his face to the mountains, or to the memory of mountains cloaked now in darkness beyond the firelight, and the stars when they emerged in the clear night sky left shadows on the ground around them.
Lottie rinsed their cookpans in the acequia and stowed them in the car while Palmer lugged and spread their bedrolls. He stripped off his jeans and shirt and folded them for a pillow, and she did likewise, and together they lay like truants, drinking in the nighttime sky.
She woke to a slamming of car doors and the twin shadows of men silhouetted in the roadway. She kneed the dozing Palmer, who rolled and clacked his mouth and settled back to sleep.
Well, shit. Would you look at this.
The men descended the embankment in a welter of dust and pebbles as Lottie rose to her elbows with her blanket at her chin.
The men loomed over her, their hat brims eclipsing the sun. They wore matching boots and khaki pants with blue piping. The shorter man placed a hand on his hip as he stubbed Palmer with his toe.
Hey! Wake up, Nancy.
Palmer rolled and shaded his eyes. He sat upright.
The man backed a step. Get up, he ordered. Nice and easy.
Palmer rose from his bedroll, his blanket sliding away. He wore a yellowed T-shirt and nothing else and he stood pale and dangling with his hands raised in mock surrender.
You too, said the taller man.
Lottie rose with her blanket pressed to her chest, until the man stepped forward and snatched it away.
Ah, hell, he said, half-turning toward the mountains. We thought you was a boy. He held the blanket out to her at arm’s length.
They were lawmen in khaki shirts with epaulets and pleated pockets. They wore patches on their shoulders and sidearms high on their hips in flapped leather holsters. The shorter man wore a leather strap across his chest in a vaguely military fashion.
How old are you? the shorter man demanded. His hair was gray and close-cropped in the shadow of his hat brim.
Now hold on, Sheriff, Palmer began, but the man cut him off.
Lottie gripped the blanket with both hands. She looked from the man to Palmer.
Sixteen.
The man jerked his thumb, and the deputy turned and started toward the cars.
Put your pants on, you.
Glad you boys come along when you did, Sheriff. Palmer spoke rapidly as he hopped into his dungarees. The missus and me was just gettin some shut-eye. We come all the way—
Shut it.
Above them, the deputy drew a clipboard from the front seat of the police car. He tilted his hat and circled to the rear of the Buick.
You get your clothes on, miss. He turned and nodded to Palmer. You come with me.
The man waited while Palmer tugged at his boots and shrugged into his shirt. He placed a hand on Palmer’s arm and guided him up the embankment, with Palmer turning to look at Lottie where she stood.
Lottie dressed quickly and carried both bedrolls to the Buick. The police car was angled on the gravel before it, blocking their escape. The black Ford coupe had white doors on which RIO ARRIBA had been stenciled in arching letters over a large gilt star.
The men stood talking at the rear of the Buick. You all must be Mormons, she heard the deputy say as he handed off the clipboard. My great-aunt—
Lester, the sheriff said. Lottie watched him as he flipped pages and glanced from his list to the license plate, the deputy eyeing the sheriff and Palmer eyeing the deputy’s holstered gun. Then the sheriff handed off the clipboard and stood with fists on hips, waiting for Lottie to join them.
I don’t suppose you’ve got a driver’s license? he asked her. Or some other ID?
About what?
The man looked up the roadway. He sighed.
Look, Sheriff, it ain’t like we’s tramps or nothin. We come up from Texas on our way to the rodeo in Durango. I was noddin off come nightfall, and I thought it’d be safer to park here than to keep on goin, that’s all.
Hot damn, I knew you was a cowboy, the deputy said, grinning. Ain’t that what I said when I seen the saddle? My uncle Jim Thomas was a pickup man up at—
What events you ride? the sheriff interrupted.
Saddle bronc mostly. Some bareback.
The sheriff nodded. He was looking at the girl with the dirty face and the thin and dirty clothes who stood biting her lip as if hoping for a wind that might lift her up and carry her eastward into the Brazos.
I allowed maybe you was a calf roper.
What’s that supposed to mean?
It means we got laws in this county about vagrancy, the sheriff told Palmer, still eyeing the girl. Bein from Texas ain’t no defense I ever heard of. He leaned and spat in the roadway. You go on and get in your car, and consider yourselves warned. Come on, Lester. Let’s get.
The sheriff stayed and watched as they circled their car, and he kept on watching as the doors slammed and the dust jumped and the engine sputtered and caught. Only then did he step up to the Buick and nudge his hat and lean his face into the doorframe.
Mister, it’s thirty-five miles straight ahead to the state line. Make sure you don’t get lost.
You see ’em? Palmer shouted over the engine sound as they threaded the Chama valley with the Buick yawing on the gravel washboard, bouncing and pinging and trailing great billows of dust.
The enveloping landscape was a patchwork of pine forest and rolling grassland, green against darker green through which creekbeds ran and cattle moved in slow and beaded strings. They bore west onto State Road 17 near the village of Chama, New Mexico, where they crossed the Continental Divide and glimpsed the distant La Platas, lilac dark and snow-veined in their upper rincons. Then north again at Lumberton, through brakes of scrub and cedar framed by low a
nd rolling hills.
It was coming noon when they crossed the state line, then the Navajo and Blanco Rivers. There they met Highway 450, and they followed it westward into the resort town of Pagosa Springs, Colorado.
The main street was a western-town set of wooden falsefronts and covered sidewalks, of Victorian homes and sandstone emporiums before which flags fluttered and cars and trucks were angled. They stopped for gasoline, and then for lunch at a small café on whose rear deck they sat at a painted table to watch the San Juan River tumble and eddy in a sulfurous haze that enveloped the near-naked bathers who waded and basked on the gravel bars amid huge and steaming boulders.
You done good back there, Palmer told her. It ain’t me I’m worried about so much as your pa. They probly got a warrant out by now. We got to be careful who we talk to.
What’s a Mormon? she asked him.
A Mormon is kindly like a Catholic, only from Utah.
Where’s Utah?
West of here. The Utes is Indians, and the Mormons is white settlers.
How come that deputy thought we was Mormons?
I don’t rightly know. We must look Utah somehows, and I guess he figured we wasn’t Indians.
Below them, boys were running and splashing. Palmer rose and crossed to the railing and called down to them. The boys stopped and looked up, and one of them waved. Then they were off again, sleek river otters in cutoff denims chasing and roughhousing in the vaporous shallows.
Damn, that looks like fun, he said, returning to his seat.
They ate sandwiches with lemonade, and Palmer ordered a beer. When they’d finished their dinners, they climbed down to the riverbank and Palmer rolled his pantlegs and waded into the steaming shoals while Lottie held his boots.
He talked to the boys. He fished coins from his pocket and tossed them, and the boys ran jostling and diving to claim them. When the coins were gone, he splashed at the boys and they at him, and he ran laughing and dripping back to where she waited on the gravel bank.
We’d best be movin on, he told her.
The high country through which they next passed was to Lottie like a veil uplifted to expose the glowing face of God.
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