The Crossing(134)

Sí, sí, slurred the shill. Es un espectáculo. Nunca ha visto nada como esto.

He seized the shill’s thin wrist and held it. Olga, hombre, he said. No quiero verlo, me entiende?

The shill shrank in his grip, he cast a despairing look back over his shoulder toward the pitchman who stood waiting with his cane resting across the rostrum before him. All had turned to see the winner at the outermost reach of the lights. The woman by the wheel stood coquettishly, her forefinger twisted into the dimple in her cheek. The pitchman raised his cane and made with it a sweeping motion. Adelante, he cried. Qué pasó?

He pushed the shill from him and released his wrist but the shill far from being cast down only crept to his side and plucking with small motions of his fingers at his clothes began to whisper at his ear of the attractions of the spectacle within the caravan. The pitchman called out to him again. He said that everyone was waiting. But Billy had already turned to go and the pitchman called after him a last time and made some comment to the crowd which set them laughing and trying to see over their shoulders. The shill stood forlornly with the barata in his hands but the pitchman said that there would be no third assay with the wheel but rather the woman who turned the wheel would make a selection herself as to who should enter free. She smiled and scanned the faces with her painted eyes and pointed out a young boy at the forefront of the crowd but the pitchman said that he was too young and that it would not he permitted and the woman made a pout and said that all the same he was muy guapo and then she selected a brownskinned peon who stood stiffly before her in what may have been rented clothes and came down the steps and took him by the hand and the pitchman held up a roll of tickets in his fist and the men pressed forward to purchase them.

He walked out beyond the strung lights and crossed the field to where he’d left his horse and he paid the establero and led Niño clear of the other animals and mounted up. He looked back at the haze of the carnival lights burning in the crisp and smoky air and then rode out across the railtracks and took the road south out of Madera toward Temosachic.

A week later he rode again through Babícora in the early morning dark. Cool and quiet. No dogs. The hoofclop of the horses. The blue moonshadow of the horses and the rider passing slant along the street in a constant headlong falling. The road north had been freshly graded with a fresno and he rode along the selvedge through the soft dirt of the endspill. Dark junipers out on the plain islanded in the dawn. Dark cattle. A white sun rising.

He watered the horses at a grassy ciénega where ancient cottonwoods stood in an elfin round and rolled himself into his soogan and slept. When he woke a man was sitting a horse watching him. He sat up. The man smiled. Te conozco, he said.

Billy reached and got his hat and put it on. Yeah, he said. And I know you.

Mánde?

Dónde está su compañero?

The man lifted one hand from the pommel in a vague gesture. Se murió, he said. Dónde está la muchacha?

Lo mismo.

The man smiled. He said that God’s ways were strange ones.

Tiene razón.

Y su hermano’

No sé. Muerto también, tal vez.

Tantos, said the man.

Billy looked toward where the horses were grazing. He’d been sleeping with his head on the mochila where his pistol was buckled away. The man’s eyes followed his where they looked. He said for every man that death selects another is reprieved and he smiled in a conspiratorial manner. As one met with another of his kind. He leaned forward with his hands squared on the pommel of his saddle and spat.

Qué piensa? he said.

Billy wasnt sure what it was that he was being asked. He said men die.

The man sat his horse and weighed this soberly. As if there might be some deeper substrate to this reflection with which he must reckon. He said that men believe death’s elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destinv. He said that moreover it could not be otherwise that men’s ends are dictated at their birth and that they will seek their deaths in the face of every obstacle. He said that both views were one view and that while men may meet with death in strange and obscure places which they might well have avoided it was mire correct to say that no matter how hidden or crooked the path to their destruction yet they would seek it out. He smiled. He spoke as one who seemed to understand that death was the condition of existence and life but an emanation thereof.

Qué piensa usted? he said. Billy said that he had no opinion beyond the one he’d given. He said that whether a man’s life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it. He said that while it was true that men shape their own lives it was also true that they could have no shape other for what then would that shape be?