Cities of the Plain(64)

Nada.

They jostled on, the truck in second gear, the headlights rocking. When they rounded the first turn in the road the lights of the city appeared out on the plain below them thirty miles away.

It gets cold up here, Héctor said.

Yep.

You spent the night up here yet?

I was up here a couple of nights till past midnight.

He looked at Héctor. Héctor took his makings from his shirtpocket and sat rolling a cigarette.

Tienes tus dudas.

He shrugged. He popped a match with the nail of his thumb and lit the cigarette and blew the match out. Hombre de precaución, he said.

Yo?

Yo.

Two owls crouching in the dust of the road turned their pale and heartshaped faces in the trucklights and blinked and rose on their white wings as silent as two souls ascending and vanished in the darkness overhead.

Buhos, said John Grady.

Lechuzas.

Tecolotes.

Héctor smiled. He took a drag on the cigarette. His dark face glowed in the dark glass. Quizás, he said.

Pueda ser.

Pueda ser. Sí.


WHEN HE WALKED into the kitchen Oren was still at the table. He hung up his hat and went to the sink and washed and got his coffee. Socorro came out of her room and shooed him away from the stove and he took his coffee to the table and sat. Oren looked up from his paper.

What’s the news, Oren?

You want the good or the bad?

I dont know. Just pick out somethin in the middle.

They dont have nothin like that in here. It wouldnt be news.

I guess not.

McGregor girl’s been picked to be the Sun Carnival Queen. You ever see her?

No.

Sweet girl. How’s your place comin?

Okay.

Socorro set his plate before him together with a plate of biscuits covered with a cloth.

She aint no city gal is she?

No.

That’s good.

Yeah. It is.

Parham tells me she’s pretty as a speckled pup.

He thinks I’m crazy.

Well. You might be a little crazy. He might be a little jealous.

He watched the boy eat. He sipped his coffee.

When I got married my buddies all told me I was crazy. Said I’d regret it.

Did you?

No. It didnt work out. But I didnt regret it. It wasnt her fault.

What happened?

I dont know. A lot of things. Mostly I couldnt get along with her folks. The mother was just a goddamned awful woman. I thought I’d seen awful but I hadnt. If the old man would of lived we might of had a chance. But he had a bad heart. I seen the whole thing comin. When I inquired after his health it was more than just idle curiosity. He finally up and died and here she come. Bag and baggage. That was pretty much the end of it.

He took his cigarettes from the table and lit one. He blew smoke thoughtfully out across the room. He watched the boy.

We was together three years almost to the day. She used to bathe me, if you can believe that. I liked her real well. She’d of been a orphan we’d be married yet.

I’m sorry to hear it.

A man gets married he dont know what’s liable to happen. He may think he does, but he dont.

Probably right.

If you sincerely want to hear all about what is wrong with you and what you ought to do to rectify it all you need to do is let them inlaws on the place. You’ll get a complete rundown on the subject and I guarantee it.

She aint got no family.

That’s good, said Oren. That’s your smartest move yet.

After Oren had gone he sat over his coffee a long time. Through the window far to the south he could see the thin white adderstongues of lightning licking silently along the rim of the sky in the darkness over Mexico. The only sound was the clock ticking in the hallway.

When he entered the barn Billy’s light was still on. He went down to the stall where he kept the pup and gathered it up all twisting and whimpering in the crook of his arm and brought it back to his bunkroom. He stood at the door and looked back.

Goodnight, he called.

He pushed aside the curtain and felt overhead in the dark for the lightswitch chain.

Goodnight, called Billy.

He smiled. He let go the chain and sat on his bunk in the darkness rubbing the pup’s belly. He could smell the horses. The wind was gusting up and a piece of loose roofingtin at the far end of the barn rattled and the wind passed on. It was cold in the room and he thought to light the little kerosene heater but after a while he just pulled off his boots and trousers and put the pup in his box and crawled under the blankets. The wind outside and the cold in the room were like those winter nights on the north Texas plains when he was a child in his grandfather’s house. When the storms blew down from the north and the prairie land about the house stood white in the sudden lightning and the house shook in the thunderclaps. On just such nights and just such mornings in the year he’d gotten his first colt he’d wrap himself in his blanket and go out and cross to the barn, leaning into the wind, the first drops of rain slapping at him hard as pebbles, moving down the long barn bay like some shrouded refugee among the sudden slats of light that stood staccato out of the parted board walls, moving through those serried and electric prosceniums where they flared white and fugitive across the barn row on row until he reached the stall where the little horse stood waiting and unlatched the door and sat in the straw with his arms around its neck till it stopped trembling. He would be there all night and he would be there in the morning when Arturo came to the barn to feed. Arturo would walk with him back to the house before anyone else was awake, brushing the straw from his blanket as he walked beside him, not saying a word. As if he were a young lord. As if he were never to be disinherited by war and war’s machinery. All his early dreams were the same. Something was afraid and he had come to comfort it. He dreamed it yet. And this: standing in the room in the black suit tying the new black tie he wore to his grandfather’s funeral on the cold and windy day of it. And standing in his cubicle in Mac McGovern’s horsebarn on another such day in the cold dawn before work in another such suit, the two halves of the box it came in lying on the bunk with the crepe tissue spilling out and the cut string lying beside it on the bunk together with the knife he’d cut it with that had belonged to his father and Billy standing in the doorway watching him. He buttoned the coat and stood. His hands crossed at the wrist in front of him. His face pale in the glass of the little mirror he’d propped on one of the two by fours that braced the rough stud wall of the room. Pale in the light of the winter that was on the country. Billy leaned and spat in the chaff and turned and went out down the barn bay and crossed to the house for breakfast.