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The Crossing(133)

By:Cormac McCarthy


No.

She put her hand forefinger first against her mouth. Almost in such a gesture as to admonish one to silence. She held her hand out as if she might touch him. She said that his brother’s bones lay in the cemetery at San Buenaventura.

It was dark when he went out and untied the horse and mounted up. He rode out past the sallow waxen windowlights and took the road south the way he’d come. Beyond the first rise the town vanished behind him and the stars swarmed everywhere in the blackness overhead and there was no sound at all in the night save the steady clop of the hooves in the road, the faint creak of leather, the breath of the horses.

He rode that country for weeks making inquiry of anyone willing to be inquired of. In a bodega in the mountain town of Temosachic he first heard lines from that corrido in which the young güero comes down from the north. Pelo tan rubio. Pistola en mano. Qué buscas joven? Que to levantas tan temprano. He asked the corridero who was this joven of which he sang but he only said that it was a youth who sought justice as the song told and that he had been dead many years. The corridero held the fretted neck of his instrument with one hand and raised his glass from the table and toasted silently his inquisitor and toasted aloud the memory of all just men in the world for as it was sung in the corrido theirs was a bloodfilled road and the deeds of their lives were writ in that blood which was the world’s heart’s blood and he said that serious men sang their song and their song only.

Late April in the town of Madera he stabled his horse and went afoot through a fair in the field beyond the railtracks. It was cold in that mountain town and the air was filled with the smoke of piñon wood and the smell of pitch from the sawmill. In the field the lights were strung overhead and barkers called out their nostrums or called out the wonders hid within the shabby stenciled pitchtents staked with guyropes in the trampled grass. He bought a cup of cider from a vendor and watched the faces of the townsfolk, the faces dark and serious, the black eyes that seemed on the point of ignition beneath the feria lights. The girls that passed holding hands. The naive boldness of their glances. He stood before a painted caravan where a man in a red and gilded pulpit chanted to a gathering of men. A wheel with the figures from the lotería was fastened to the wall of the caravan and a girl in a red sheath and a black and silver bolero jacket stood on a wood platform ready to turn the wheel. The man in the pulpit turned to the girl and held out his cane and the girl smiled and pulled down on the side of the wheel and set it clacking. All faces turned to watch. The nails in the rim of the wheel went ratcheting over the leather pawl and the wheel slowed and came to a stop and the woman turned to the crowd and smiled. The pitchman held up his cane again and named the fading figure on the wheel whose turn had come.

La sirena, he cried.

No one moved.

Alguien?

He surveyed the crowd. They stood within a makeshift cuadra of rope. He held the cane out over them as if to ordain them into some sort of collective. The cane was black enamel and the silver head of it was in the form of a bust that may have been a likeness of the pitchman himself.

Otra vez, he cried.

His eyes swept over them. They swept over Billy where he stood alone at the edge of the crowd and they swept back. The wheel clacked and spun on its slightly eccentric track, the figures wheeled into a blur. The leather stop chattered.

A small toothless man sidled up to him and tugged at his shirt. He fanned before him the deck of cards. On the backs a pattern of arcane symbols woven into a damascene. Tome, he said. Pronto, pronto.

Cuánto?

Está fibre. Tome.

He took a peso coin from his pocket and tried to hand it to the man but the man shook his head. He looked toward the wheel. The wheel slapped slowly.

Nada, nada, he said. Tenga prisa.

The wheel slapped, slapped. He took a card.

Espere, cried the pitchman. Espere...

The wheel turned a last soft click and stopped.

La calavera, cried the pitchman.

He turned over his card. Printed on it was the calavera.

Alguien? cried the pitchman. In the crowd they looked from one to the other.

The small man at his side seized his elbow. Lo tiene, he hissed. Lo tiene.

Qué gano?

The man shook his head impatiently. He tried to hold up his hand that held the card. He said that he would get to see.

Ver que?

Adentro, hissed the man. Adentro. He reached and snatched the card from his grip and held it aloft. Aquí, he called. Aquí tenemos la calavera.

The pitchman swept his cane in a slow acceleration over the heads of the crowd and then suddenly pointed the silver cap toward Billy and the shill.

Tenemos ganador, he cried. Adelante, adelante.

Venga, wheezed the shill. He tugged at Billy’s elbow. But Billy had already seen bleeding through the garish paintwork old lettering from a prior life and he recognized the caravan of the traveling opera company that he’d seen standing with its gilded wheelspokes in the smoky courtyard of the hacienda at San Diego when he and Boyd had first ridden through the gates there in that long ago and the caravan he’d seen stranded by the roadside while the beautiful diva sat beneath her awning and waited for men and horses to return who would not return ever. He pushed the shill’s hand from his sleeve. No quiero ver, he said.