The Crossing(142)

He woke with a start from some half desperate dream. He bent over the horse where it lay quietly breathing among the leaves and he looked at the sun to see how far the day had got to. His shirt was almost dry on him and he unbuttoned the pocket and took out his money and spread it out to dry. Then he got the box of wood matches out of the saddlebags and spread them also. He walked out down the track to the spot where the ambuscade had occurred and cast about in the trackside chaparral until he found the knife. It was an oldfashioned dirk ground down out of a cheap military knife with an edge honed into both sides of the blade. He wiped it on his trousers and went back and put the knife with his other plunder. Then he walked out to where he’d left Boyd. A column of red ants had found the bones and he squatted in the leaves and studied them and then rose and trod them into the dirt and picked up the soogan and carried it out and lodged it in the fork of one of the trees and walked back and sat beside the horse.

No one passed the day long. In the afternoon he went once more to look for the other horse. He thought maybe it had gone upriver or that the highwaymen had taken it but in any case he never saw it again. By dark the matches had dried and he built a fire and put some beans to boil and sat by the fire and listened to the river passing in the dark. The cottoncolored moon that had stood in the daysky to the east rose overhead and he lay in his blankets and watched to see if any birds might cross before it on their way upriver north but if they did he did not see them and after a while he slept.

In the night as he slept Boyd came to him and squatted by the deep embers of the fire as he’d done times by the hundreds and smiled his soft smile that was not quite cynical and he took off his hat and held it before him and looked down into it. In the dream he knew that Boyd was dead and that the subject of his being so must be approached with a certain caution for that which was circumspect in life must be doubly so in death and he’d no way to know what word or gesture might subtract him back again into that nothingness out of which he’d come. When finally he did ask him what it was like to be dead Boyd only smiled and looked away and would not answer. They spoke of other things and he tried not to wake from the dream but the ghost dimmed and faded and he woke and lay looking up at the stars through the bramblework of the treelimbs and he tried to think of what that place could be where Boyd was but Boyd was dead and wasted in his bones wrapped in the soogan upriver in the trees and he turned his face to the ground and wept.

He was asleep in the morning when he heard the shouts of arrieros and the crack of whips and a wild singing in the woods downriver. He pulled on his boots and walked out to where the horse lay in the leaves. Its side rose and fell beneath the blanket that he had feared would be stiff and cold and it turned up one eye to him as he knelt over it. An eye in which lay cupped the sky and arching trees and his own nearing face. He placed one hand over the animal’s chest where the mud had caked and dried and broken. The hair was stiff and bristly with dried blood. He stroked the muscled shoulder and spoke to the horse and the horse exhaled slowly through its nose.

He fetched water again in his hat but the horse could not drink without rising. He sat and wet its mouth with his hand and listened to the arrieros on the track drawing nearer and after a while he rose and walked out and stood waiting for them.

They appeared out of the trees driving a team of six yoked oxen and they wore costumes such as he’d never seen before. Indians or gypsies perhaps by the bright colors of the shirts and the sashes that they wore. They drove the oxen with jerkline and jockeystick and the oxen labored and swayed in the traces and their breath steamed in the morning cold. Behind them on a handmade float built from green lumber and carried on old truckaxles was an airplane. It was of some ancient vintage and it was disassembled and the wings tied down with ropes alongside the fuselage. The rudder in the vertical stabilizer swung back and forth in small erratic movements with the jostling of the float as if to make corrections in their course and the oxen swayed heavily in their harness and the mismatched rubber tires rumpled softly over the stones and through the weeds on either side of the narrow track.

The drovers when they saw him raised their hands in greeting and cried out. Almost as if they’d been expecting to come upon him soon or late. They wore necklaces and silver bracelets and some wore hooplets of gold in their ears and they called out to him and pointed along the narrow road upstream in the river’s bend to a grassy flat where they would stop and rendezvous. The airplane was little more than a skeleton with sunbleached shreds of linen the color of stewed rhubarb clinging to the steambent ashwood ribs and stays and inside you could see the wires and cables that ran aft to the rudder and elevators and the cracked and curled and sunblacked leather of the seats and in their tarnished nickel bezels the glass of instrument dials glaucous and clouded from the pumicing of the desert sands. The wingstruts were tied in bundles alongside and the blades of the propellor were bent back along the cowling and the landingstruts were bent beneath the fuselage.