The Crossing(135)

Bien dicho, the man said. He looked across the country. He said that he could read men’s thoughts. Billy didnt point out to him that he’d already asked him twice for his. He asked the man could he tell what he was thinking now but the man only said that their thoughts were one and the same. Then he said he harbored no grudge toward any man over a woman for they were only property afoot to be confiscated and that it was no more than a game and not to be taken seriously by real men. He said that he had no very high opinion of men who killed over whores. In any case, he said, the bitch was dead, the world rolled on.

He smiled again. He had something in his mouth and he rolled it to one side and sucked at his teeth and rolled it back. He touched his hat.

Bueno, he said. El camino espera.

He touched his hat again and roweled the horse and sawed it around until its eyes rolled and it squatted and stamped and then went trotting out through the trees and into the road where it soon disappeared from sight. Billy unbuckled the mochila and took out the pistol and thumbed open the gate and turned the cylinder and checked the chambers and then lowered the hammer with his thumb and sat for a long time listening and waiting.

On the fifteenth of May by the first newspaper he’d seen in seven weeks he rode again into Casas Grandes and stabled his horse and took a room at the Camino Recto Hotel. He rose in the morning and walked down the tiled hallway to the bath. When he came back he stood in the window where the morning light fell slant upon the raw cords in the worn carpet underfoot and listened to a girl singing in the garden below. She was sitting on a cloth of white canvas and piled on the canvas were nueces or pecans some bushels in quantity. She sat with a flat stone in the crook of her knees and she was breaking the pecans with a stone mano and as she worked she sang. Leaning forward with her dark hair veiled about her hands she worked and sang. She sang:

Pueblo de Bachiniva

Abril era el mes

Jinetes armados

Llegaron los seis



She crushed the hulls between the stones, she separated out the meats and dropped them in a jar at her side.

Si tenía miedo

No se le veía en su cara

Cuantos vayan llegando

El güerito les espera



Splitting out with her fineboned fingers the meat from the hulls, the delicate fissured hemispheres in which is writ we must believe each feature of the tree which bore them, each feature of the tree they’d come to bear. Then she sang the same two verses over. He buttoned his shirt and got his hat and went down the stairs and out into the courtyard. When she saw him coming across the cobbles she stopped singing. He touched his hat and wished her a good day. She looked up and smiled. She was a girl of perhaps sixteen. She was very beautiful. He asked her if she knew any more verses of the corrido which she sang but she did not. She said that it was an old corrido. She said that it was very sad and that at the end the güerito and his novia die in each other’s arms for they have no more ammunition. She said that at the end the patrón’s men ride away and the people come from the town and carry the güerito and his novia to a secret place and bury them there and the little birds flew away but that she did not remember all the words and anyway she was embarrassed that he had been listening to her sing. He smiled. He told her that she had a pretty voice and she turned away and clucked her tongue.

He stood looking out across the courtyard toward the mountains to the west. The girl watched him.

Déme su mano, she said.

Mánde?

Déme su mano. She held out her own hand in a fist before her. He squatted on his bootheels and held out his hand and she gave him a handful of the shelled pecans and then closed his hand with hers and looked about as if it were some secret gift and someone might see. Ándale pues, she said. He thanked her and stood and walked back across the courtyard and up to his room but when he looked from the window again she was gone.

Days to come he rode up through the high country of the Babícora. He’d build his fire in some sheltered swale and at night sometimes he’d walk out over the grasslands and lie on the ground in the world’s silence and study the burning firmament above him. Walking back to the fire those nights he often thought about Boyd, thought of him sitting by night at just such a fire in just such country. The fire in the bajada no more than a glow, hid in the ground like some secret glimpse of the earth’s burning core broke through into the darkness. He seemed to himself a person with no prior life. As if he had died in some way years ago and was ever after some other being who had no history, who had no ponderable life to come.

He saw in his riding occasional parties of vaqueros crossing the high grasslands, sometimes mounted on mules for their good footing in the mountains, sometimes driving beeves before them. It was cold in the mountains at night but they seemed thinly dressed and had only their serapes in which to sleep. They were called mascareñas for the whitefaced cattle bred on the Babícora and they were called agringados because they worked for the white man. They crossed in silent defile over the talus slopes and rode up through the passes toward the high grassy vegas, sitting their horses with their easy formality, the low sun catching the tin cups tied to their saddlehorns. He saw their fires burning on the mountain at night but never did he go to them.