Cities of the Plain(56)

John Grady walked around and checked the pole and came back. Let’s head the horses a little bit more to the left, he said.

All right.

They eased the horses forward. The rope stretched and began to unwind slowly on its axis. They looked at the rope and they looked at the horses. They looked at each other. Then the rock moved. It began to rear haltingly up out of its resting place these thousand years and it tilted and tottered and fell forward into the little grotto with a thud they could feel through their bootsoles. The pole clattered among the rocks, the horses recovered and stood.

Kiss my ass, said Billy.

They set to digging in the bare sunless earth that the rock had vacated and in twenty minutes they’d uncovered the den. The pups were back in the farthest corner huddled in a pile. John Grady lay on his stomach and reached down and back and brought one out and held it to the light. It just filled the palm of his hand and it was fat and it swung its small muzzle about and whined and blinked its pale blue eyes.

Hold him.

How many are they?

I dont know.

He ran his arm down the hole again and reached back and brought out another. Billy sat and piled the dogs together in the crook of his knee as they came. There were four of them. I’ll bet these little shits are hungry, he said. Is that all of em?

John Grady lay with his cheek in the dirt. I think that’s them, he said.

The dogs were trying to hide under Billy’s knee. He held one up by its small nape. It hung like a sock, glaring bleakly at the world with its watery eyes.

Listen a minute, said John Grady.

They sat listening.

There’s anothern.

He ran his arm down the hole and lay on the ground feeling about in the dark beneath them. He closed his eyes. I got him, he said.

The dog he brought up was dead.

Yonder’s your runt, Billy said.

The little dog was curled and stiff, its paws before its face. He put it down and pushed his shoulder deeper into the hole.

Can you find him?

No.

Billy stood. Let me try, he said. My arm’s longern yours.

All right.

Billy lay in the dirt and ran his arm down into the hole. Come here you little turd, he said.

Have you got him?

Yeah. Damn if I dont think he’s offerin to bite me.

The dog came up mewling and twisting in his hand.

This aint no runt, he said.

Let me see him.

He’s fat as a butterball.

John Grady took the little dog and held it in his cupped hand.

Wonder what was he doin off back there by himself?

Maybe he was with the one that died.

John Grady held the dog up and looked into its small wrinkled face. I think I got me a dog, he said.


HE WORKED all through the month of December at the cabin. He carried tools horseback up the Bell Springs trail and he left a mattock and a spade beside the road and worked on the roadway by hand in the evenings when it was cool, filling the washes and cutting brush and ditching and filling in the gullies and squatting and eyeing the terrain for the way the water would run. In three weeks’ time he had the worst of the trash hauled or burned and he had painted the stove and patched the roof and driven the truck for the first time up the old road all the way to the cabin with the new lengths of blue sheetmetal stovepipe in the truckbed and the cans of paint and whitewash and new pine shelving for the kitchen.

At the wreckingyard out on Alameda he went up and down the aisles of old stacked windowsash with a steel tape measuring by height and width and checking figures against those he’d jotted on the notepad in his shirtpocket. He dragged the windows he wanted out into the aisle and got the truck and backed it to the door and he and the yardman loaded the windows in the truck. The man sold him some panes of glass to replace the broken ones and showed him how to score and break them with a glasscutter and then gave him the glasscutter.

He bought an old Mennonite kitchen table made of pine and the man helped him carry it out and set it in the bed of the truck and the man told him to take the drawer out and stand it in the bed.

You go around a curve it’ll come out of there.

Yessir.

Liable to go plumb overboard.

Yessir.

And take that glass and put it up there in the cab with you if you dont want it broke.

All right.

I’ll see you.

Yessir.

He worked long into the nights and he’d come in and unsaddle the horse and brush it in the partial darkness of the barn bay and walk across to the kitchen and get his supper out of the warmer and sit and eat alone at the table by the shaded light of the lamp and listen to the faultless chronicling of the ancient clockworks in the hallway and the ancient silence of the desert in the darkness about. There were times he’d fall asleep in the chair and wake at some strange hour and stagger up and cross the yard to the barn and get the pup and take it and put it in its box on the floor beside his bunk and lie face down with his arm over the side of the bunk and his hand in the box so that it would not cry and then fall asleep in his clothes.