by Olson, Toby
By three they were in their saddles and headed up into the foothills. The young man, his name sounded like Alma, was at the head, and Carlos brought up the rear, the donkeys tethered behind him, their line tied to his horn. It pressed against his leg when the donkeys tarried, but tugging it was familiar, some vaguely remembered gesture. He’d ridden when he was young, with his father. When he looked back, he could see John’s wheelchair strapped to a wooden frame. Larry road in front of him in his new cowboy hat, then Frank and John. Gino was lost to sight from time to time, but his broad sombrero marked him, where he bounced along behind Alma, and they’d barely climbed the initial incline and started up the next, when they heard him call out. “Are we almost there yet?” And Carlos heard John laugh up ahead, and saw him cast away the dead butt of his cigarette. The men had put folded blankets over their saddles, protection for their bony asses. Still Carlos saw their hips shift, their free hands working at their thighs, and saw Alma turn and look back when the horses broke into jarring trots, somehow knowing that, then slowing their procession down to a comfortable walk again.
The ground was desert sand, rocks and shifted slabs of shale, and they meandered, no pathway at all, and after each incline they reached a stretch of level ground, but with another incline just past that to negotiate, and they couldn’t see beyond it until they had climbed it and were confronted with another. Then they came to a rise that was a cliff’s face, an escarpment running up into the sky for a good hundred feet. They saw clouds above it and birds floating under them that may have been vultures or hawks, and Alma turned in his saddle and gestured to the right, and they headed along the escarpment, under its cool shadow, until they reached an arroyo that turned as they ascended, the horses slipping and kicking for purchase in loose shale, until the sun was blocked by a cliff face on their right as well, the air cooler, still, but growing bone-wearying.
Carlos saw John struggle to get at the blanket tied to the saddle behind him. He managed to free it. Then it was over his shoulders, his hat brim touching it, and he looked like an old Indian. They came to a turning, and light broke out again ahead, the sun shimmering in blown sand at a distance above the escarpment’s lip, a dust devil in sun, as if an animate figure standing in the air, and nothing beyond it that they could see, until they got beyond it, pressing handkerchiefs and hats into their faces against the blown grit, and their procession had paused and turned and they looked back over the plains of the state of Tamaulipas, and could see the city of Tampico, parts of it between clouds that were now under them, and beyond it the Gulf of Mexico in the far distance. They heard a slap of leather, and Alma turned them, and they saw what lay before them.
They were at the edge of a high plateau, the ground very much the same as what they had, in the last hours, passed over, stone, sand and shale, tufts of rough grass and low cactus poking up in places. The plateau seemed perfectly flat to the left and right, and ahead of them it was flat too, extending out for what seemed miles and only ending in the far distance where foothills began again, and above these foothills mountains rose, jagged and colorless, disappearing in mist and coming dusk at their upper reaches. They saw something in the distance, on the rough plain between themselves and the mountains, animals possibly, moving from left to right, but they were no more than tiny dots, blinking through cones of sand stirred up by capricious wind gusts.
“Good Christ,” Frank said. “How far do you think that is?”
“I don’t know, but we won’t get there tonight,” Carlos answered.
They made camp in the middle of the plain. It could have been anywhere on the plain. It was just rock and cactus and flatness, and the wind rose and began to blow constantly as the sun sank. Alma circled the animals, their heads facing into the circle, muzzles touching and brushing against each other, their lids half closed, approaching sleep already, and staked them there. Then, while the men sat slumped in the sand and Carlos worked to unhitch needed belongings, he went to the water and feed that was a donkey’s burden and removed pottery vessels from the wooden rack there and went back and fed and watered them. Then he stepped away into the growing darkness surrounding their campsite, and in a few minutes came back, arms loaded with sticks and bleached branches that he had found somewhere. Then he got to work on the fire.
It was later. The fire had flamed high into the night at first, but then had settled into a bright, hot glow that was circumscribed, like a fire in a hearth, bright enough to bathe their faces where they sat in a circle facing in at the fire and across it at each other. Alma had set a stone vessel in the embers, and in minutes there was steam rising from it. It was a kind of stew, delicious and warm in their bellies, spicy and sweet, and they ate heartily. They’d cast away stones and dug the trenches in sand in the way Alma had demonstrated. They’d lain in their sleeping bags in them, to test them, finding them comfortable and deep enough to break the wind. They were behind them, still in the fire’s light, and they each knew they’d just have to roll over and crawl in, not much effort and unexpected pain.
“This is some fucking thing,” Gino said, smiling at Alma, who sat beside Carlos beyond the embers. Alma smiled back, as if he understood.
“Does he say we’ll get there tomorrow?” Larry asked.
Carlos shook his head. “I don’t know. I can’t quite get that out of him.”
A breeze blew at the blanket at John’s shoulder, and Frank reached over and pulled it and tucked it under his arm. John was smoking again, and he passed the pack and saw Alma tear the filter away before lighting up, using a stick with a glowing tip.
“Should we talk?” Gino said.
“About what?” Frank said. “Our fucking aching bones?”
“Could be it’s a good hurt,” John said. “Like work? Remember that?”
“I don’t know,” Larry said. “But it could be a comfort, to think of it that way, I mean.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Frank said.
Carlos was watching them, in their hats and blankets in the fire’s glow. The light from the fire bathed their cheeks and brows, and shadows cast by their noses caused angular planes, reconstructing their features. Heads turned and mouths opened on dark holes, and their hair was invisible in darkness above their bone-hard and receding brows. Calaveras, he thought. They’re even dressed for some historical occasion. But they were not that. In the firelight, in expression, they were animate and particular. Only when they were poised and listening, or falling asleep with their eyes open, as was Gino now, did they seem part of that other life.
“Shit! I’m falling asleep here like a horse!” Gino said, and they all laughed. Then they ordered their clothing and rolled over and crawled into their sleeping bags. Alma went into the darkness again for more wood, and when he returned they were all sleeping.
The Mountains
They spent another day and night on the barren plateau, and when they awoke near dawn on the morning of the second day they found they were under the mountains and that the wind had died. The men were slow and heavy-footed, blankets over their shoulders and their hats screwed tight, and in the first dawn shadows they looked like old tintypes.
Larry turned, and Carlos saw his hollow cheeks across the coffee fire, grit now in the creases near his eyes and a dark hue, like old blood, where sand had blasted his brow. His face had hardened into a fixed expression, as if a clay casting had replaced it, and he was looking to where Frank sat on his sleeping bag, tending to Gino, who was coughing. His tracheotomy tube had gotten clogged with sand, and he’d removed it, and Frank was reaming and washing it in water in a clay bowl. “The fucking thing,” Carlos heard, and then more coughing. When they were finished and the tube was back in place and Gino had blown through it, Frank rose and hobbled off beyond the staked animals, to relieve himself in privacy on the plain.
The mountains started up in slabs of rock and low growth, much like the ground they’d left behind, but by mid-morning they had come upon a distinct trail. Two horses wide, it moved through sand and
shoulder-high rock at first, then, when the rock fell away to either side, they found the ground had turned to dirt, the rock become pine and honeysuckle, and they were in a small fertile valley, densely populated with trees of various kinds, birds flitting in them, and singing, and they were in cool shade, protected from a sun that had heated up as they ascended. They could smell the horses now, and the donkeys back behind them, and they could hear them blow and wheeze.
“Pollen.” It was Alma at the head, the first word they’d understood, and Gino looked back and grinned, his sombrero tilted, and Carlos thought he saw weak laughter in John’s shoulders.
They ate lunch in the saddle, just bread and a tepid fruity brew produced by Alma, and by early afternoon they could see the valley narrowing, dark rock escarpments rising to either side, spied through the trees, and when they came to the valley’s far end, what seemed at first an impenetrable rock wall gave way where the trees ended, and they found themselves in a narrow arroyo, pebbles and petrified wood, and were climbing once again, single file.
The arroyo twisted and turned, clearly a snow runoff river that coursed quickly in winter, and at times Alma and Gino were out of Carlos’s sight up ahead. The horses kicked and shuffled in the uncertain footing, fighting for purchase, and Carlos saw Frank’s legs gripped tight to his animal’s barrel, saw John ahead, his hand come up to hold his threatened hat. Then the arroyo straightened, ascending even more steeply, and by the time they’d reached the place where it ended and there was firm ground again, the horses were lathered and blowing and the men were too, sweat-soaked and shaking. Alma reined in and pulled up there, and they all sat in their saddles, wheezing through their tracheotomy tubes and pulling at their clothing.
They were standing in a quiet glade, tall pines rising around them and dark green moss under the horses’ hooves. Larry coughed and seemed ready to speak, but Alma’s hand was in the air, gesturing for them to get going. There was light up ahead where the glade ended, and he kicked his horse gently and started them off in that direction, and when they got there and the trees fell away behind them, they found they were out under a cooler sun, high above a broad open valley that sloped up in the far distance, becoming another mountain, but a verdant and low one, a kind of broad dome under the sky, and they heard water off to the right, the gurgling of a small stream or quiet river. Alma turned them away from the edge of the steep descent, rock and twisted scrub and pine running down the slope to the valley’s floor, and they moved back from it and along it, heading toward the sound, ghost figures in their dusty clothing and sweat-stained faces. Then the sun left, blocked by an outcrop of massive rock, and Alma led them back into the trees and shade and around the rock that increased the shade, and when they could see the lip of the steep descent again and were back in sun, they came to the source of the water sound.
They were in a small entranceway. The rock rose up to their left, just feet away, and in its face hung iron rings, and when they looked down to the horses’ hooves and saw the prints of many previous horses, they knew the rings were meant for tethering. Off to the right, the trees were thin, and through their branches they could see more rock and what seemed man-made things, and they could hear the water there. Alma climbed from the saddle and tied his horse’s reins to one of the rings, then gestured for the men to do the same. Carlos could hear their joints creak as they struggled to the ground and knew some of the sounds came from his own body. Alma waited patiently to the side as the men stretched and groaned, and only when Gino said “All right, all right” did he head into the stand of trees, looking back to see that they were following. Their destination was no more than thirty yards away, and when they got there they all stood in a certain wonder and immediate anticipation at the brink of it.
It was a hot spring, a bowl carved out in a slab of ground rock over many years, fed by a steaming rivulet behind it where the rock ascended in natural steps into the pine forest. What they’d heard was the run of the watercourse as it gurgled down many stone steps, flowing between shelves and washing over rounded boulders, until it fell for a few feet, a solid cylinder, as from a massive faucet, stirring the pool’s surface turgidly, then running out in gentle waves to wash over at the bowl’s perimeter. And there were stone and pottery planters on the shelves beside the course of the descending stream and small fruit trees growing in them, green leaves, oranges and pomegranates, and beyond the pool’s lip, to the sides of the water’s fall, stone seats had been fashioned, heavy rock blocks, and there were clothes trees behind them, actual trees, ash or hickory, thought Carlos, stripped white by age and weather, staked firmly in the mossy ground beyond the rock, trimmed branches like hooks, for hanging shirts, pants, and underwear.
Gino was the first in, naked at the edge, still wearing his sombrero. Carlos could see the purple scar tissue covering Gino’s back and running in serpentine lines down his knotty arms and legs. He sat on the stone at the pool’s edge, his feet in the water, then slipped in and disappeared, his hat left to float on the surface, and when he appeared again he was across on the pool’s other side, his head and shoulders, grinning and blowing through his tube. Then they all were in, even Alma, who entered in a shallow dive, making no splash, like a dark dolphin. Carlos saw Larry’s bald head, dust washed away at his mustache, Frank’s heavy chest, thick with brittle grey hair.
They were in the pool a long time. There was no soap, but there was sand at the bottom and they used it to scrub themselves. The water was hot and soothing, and in a while they were just bobbing in their places, Larry at the pool’s rim, his head rested against rock, possibly sleeping, the others moving slowly into various engagements, speaking softly, then moving on, arms in lazy waves across the surface. Carlos hung in the water beside the falling cylinder, feeling the pleasure of its massage, and looked out beyond the pool and down into the valley and across it to where the mountain’s dome rose up in the bright sky. There were a few thin clouds above it now, almost touching it. We’ll be going there, he thought. Then he looked back to see the way they’d come and spied out the twists and turns in the ascending arroyo. They were high above it now, and though it was lost to sight where the rocky walls containing it rose up in places, he could see the course of its meandering, its bed of brush and stone, and that it forked off at a few turnings where other dry rivers joined it. It was a maze, unseen in their ascending, for Alma had known the way, and he could see a double forking near the top and that it rose to level ground in a number of places in addition to the one they’d used. He was looking down a brief pathway through the trees, branches waving slowly across his vision, and beyond the pathway he could see a space of open ground, rough earth where he thought a river fork might empty as it finished its ascent. He lifted his eyes beyond the lip to trace the arroyo’s branchings as it twisted down. Then he saw something, a trace of movement in a declivity in the rocky wall. An animal, he thought, but it bobbed oddly, and when it appeared again he thought it was the crown of a hat. And then the arroyo turned and the rock fell away for a moment, and he saw the head below the hat and the horse’s head and the other rider moving up to the side in the tight passage.
He climbed out of the pool and went naked around it and entered the pine stand, then went to the horses and searched through the packs and bundles until he found the binoculars. They were Gino’s, a fine old pair, and he went back to the pool with them, chilled a little in the dry air, and climbed back into bubbling warm water beside the falling cylinder. Then he lifted the glasses and searched the arroyo once again. The men were dreaming in the pool now, eyes closed, Larry asleep at the rim, the others listlessly bobbing in place, their arms hanging suspended below the surface, and only Alma was aware of the tenseness in Carlos’s shoulders as he concentrated.
Then he found them again, two riders, faceless at this distance, but he could see their hats and leather-dressed bodies and the scabbards strapped to the horses’ haunches at their legs and the butts of the rifles in them, and he thought he could see the shine
of a pistol in a holster at the hip of one rider. They passed out of sight at a turning, then appeared again, their horses pressed together, slipping on the uncertain ground, and he thought he saw one reach across and touch the other. Their hats tilted back, and they seemed to be gazing up the arroyo to where Carlos was watching them, naked in the pool. Then they were entering an edge of shadow under the rock wall and soon they were out of sight. Carlos lowered the glasses and looked across the surface of the water to where Alma was, watching him, then he climbed out of the pool again and moved down the brief pathway through the trees and across open ground until he was standing at the edge of the arroyo’s emptying. He could feel a breeze at the lip. The hair at his groin stiffened, and he lifted the glasses again and found them immediately. They’d reached a place where the arroyo opened and the ascent was less steep, and their horses stepped ahead with more certainty, though slowly, and their figures were distinct in the glass as he spied them passing among branches of scrub oak and poplar, leaves casting mottled shadows over their clothing and faces. They seemed much closer than he would have imagined, and when he lowered the binoculars for a moment he found he could see them quite well without them, no more than two hundred yards away. Then he looked back through the tree-lined pathway to the pool. The men were there as before, but Alma was nowhere to be found, and he turned back and lifted the glasses once again.
The one on the left wore a leather vest over a dark shirt buttoned at the wrists and a stained Stetson, and when they came out from under the leaf shadows and into a brief clearing, Carlos saw him reach among objects tethered to the saddle and find the scabbard. He pulled the weapon free, its barrel glinting in the sun, and Carlos saw his fingers near the chamber and trigger housing, checking or arranging something. Then he was working to get the rifle back in place and was having trouble, and Carlos saw the other figure, in leather shirt and breeches, fringe along the sleeves and legs, listing to the side, his body shaking, racked by some malady. The one holding the rifle had his head down, face invisible under his hat’s dark circle, as he struggled, the barrel hitting among hanging objects as he searched for the scabbard’s mouth. There were pots and pans there, sacks and awkward satchels, some thick and quilted, and Carlos saw what he thought was a pink cosmetics case, square and made of plastic, and behind the saddle, over the bedroll secured there, other objects were tied with leather thongs, a set of skewers and a cooking grate, what might have been the sections of a fishing pole, a bundle made of wood utensils, a black skillet, and a net bag full of what seemed dirty laundry.