Cities of the Plain(82)

You didnt eat, he said. That’s where you were smart.

He pushed himself off the wall. He stood at the streetcurb and felt before him with one foot and he tried to hurry in case a car should come but he was afraid he’d fall and he didnt know if he could get up again.

A little later he remembered crossing the street but it seemed a long while ago. He’d seen lights ahead. They turned out to be from a tortilla factory. A clanking of old chaindriven machinery, a few workers in flourdusted aprons talking under a yellow lightbulb. He lurched on. Past dark houses. Empty lots. Old slumped mud walls half buried in wind-driven trash. He slowed, he stood teetering. Dont sit down, he said.

But he did. What woke him was someone going through his bloodsoaked pockets. He seized a thin and bony wrist and looked up into the face of a young boy. The boy flailed and kicked and tried to pull away. He called out to his friends but they were on the run across the empty lot. They’d all thought he was dead.

He pulled the boy close. Mira, he said. Está bien. No te molestaré.

Déjame, said the boy.

Está bien. Está bien.

The boy wrenched about. He looked after his friends but they’d vanished in the darkness. Déjame, he said. He was close to tears.

John Grady talked to him the way he’d talk to a horse and after a while the boy stopped pulling and stood. He told him that he was a great filero and that he had just killed an evil man and that he needed the boy’s help. He said that the police would be looking for him and that he needed to hide from them. He spoke for a long time. He told the boy of his exploits as a knifefighter and he reached with great difficulty to his hip pocket and got his billfold and gave it to the boy. He told him that the money in it was his to keep and then he told him what he must do. Then he had the boy repeat it back. Then he turned loose of the boy’s wrist and waited. The boy stepped back. He stood holding the bloodstained wallet. Then he squatted and looked into the man’s eyes. His arms clutching his bony knees. Puede andar? he said.

Un poquito. No mucho.

Es peligroso aquí.

Sí. Tienes razón.

The boy got him up and he leaned on that narrow shoulder while they made their way to the farther corner of the lot where behind the wall was a clubhouse made from packingcrates. The boy knelt and pulled back a drapery of sacking and helped him to crawl in. He said that there was a candle there and matches but the wounded filero said that it was safer in the dark. He’d started to bleed all over again. He could feel it under his hand. Vete, he said. Vete. The boy let drop the curtain.

The cushions he lay on were damp from the rain and they stank. He was very thirsty. He tried not to think. He heard a car pass in the street. He heard a dog bark. He lay with the yellow silk of his enemy’s shirt wrapped about him like a ceremonial sash gone dark with blood and he held his bloodied claw of a hand over the severed wall of his stomach. Holding himself close that he not escape from himself for he felt it over and over, that lightness that he took for his soul and which stood so tentatively at the door of his corporeal self. Like some light-footed animal that stood testing the air at the open door of a cage. He heard the distant toll of bells from the cathedral in the city and he heard his own breath soft and uncertain in the cold and the dark of the child’s playhouse in that alien land where he lay in his blood. Help me, he said. If you think I’m worth it. Amen.


WHEN HE FOUND the horse standing saddled in the bay of the barn he led it out and mounted up and rode out in the dark up the old road toward John Grady’s little adobe house. He hoped the horse would tell him something. When he reached the house and saw the light in the window he put the horse forward at a trot and went splashing through the little creek and into the yard where he pulled up and dismounted and halloed the house.

He pushed open the door. Bud? he said. Bud?

He walked into the bedroom.

Bud?

There was no one there. He went out and called and waited and called again. He went back in and opened the stove door. A fire was laid with stovechunks and kindling and newsprint. He shut the door and went out. He called but no one answered. He mounted up and gave the horse its head and kneed it forward but it only wanted to set out across the creek and back down the road again.

He turned and rode back and waited at the little house for an hour but no one came. By the time he got back to the ranch it was almost midnight.

He lay on his bunk and tried to sleep. He thought he heard the whistle of a train in the distance, thin and lost. He must have been sleeping because he had a dream in which the dead girl came to him hiding her throat with her hand. She was covered in blood and she tried to speak but she could not. He opened his eyes. Very faintly he had heard the phone ring in the house.