The Crossing(46)

Border Trilogy 2 - The Crossing





II


DOOMED ENTERPRISES divide lives forever into the then and the now. He’d carried the wolf up into the mountains in the bow of the saddle and buried her in a high pass under a cairn of scree. The little wolves in her belly felt the cold draw all about them and they cried out mutely in the dark and he buried them all and piled the rocks over them and led the horse away. He wandered on into the mountains. He whittled a bow from a holly limb, made arrows from cane. He thought to become again the child he never was.

They rode the high country for weeks and they grew thin and gaunted man and horse and the horse grazed on the sparse winter grass in the mountains and gnawed the lichens from the rock and the boy shot trout with his arrows where they stood above their shadows on the cold stone floors of the pools and he ate them and ate green nopal and then on a windy day traversing a high saddle in the mountains a hawk passed before the sun and its shadow ran so quick in the grass before them that it caused the horse to shy and the boy looked up where the bird turned high above them and he took the bow from his shoulder and nocked and loosed an arrow and watched it rise with the wind rattling the fletching slotted into the cane and watched it turning and arcing and the hawk wheeling and then flaring suddenly with the arrow locked in its pale breast.

The hawk turned and skated off down the wind and vanished beyond the cape of the mountain, a single feather fell. He rode out to look for it but he never found it. He found a single drop of blood that had dried on the rocks and darkened in the wind and nothing more. He dismounted and sat on the ground beside the horse where the wind blew and he made a cut in the heel of his hand with his knife and watched the slow blood dropping on the stone. Two days later he sat the horse on a promontory overlooking the Bavispe River and the river was running backwards. That or the sun was setting in the east behind him. He made his rough camp in a windbreak of juniper and waited out the night to see what the sun would do or what the river and in the morning when day broke over the distant mountains and across the broad plain before him he realized that he had crossed back through the mountains to where the river ran north again along the eastern side of the Sierras.

He rode deeper into the mountains. He sat on a windfall tree in a high forest of madroño and ash and with his knife cut to length a piece of rope while the horse watched. He stood and strung the rope through the beltloops of his jeans where they hung from his hips and folded away the knife. It aint nothin to eat, he told the horse.

In that wild high country he’d lie in the cold and the dark and listen to the wind and watch the last few embers of his fire at their dying and the red crazings in the woodcoals where they broke along their unguessed gridlines. As if in the trying of the wood were elicited hidden geometries and their orders which could only stand fully revealed, such is the way of the world, in darkness and ashes. He heard no wolves. Ragged and half starving and his horse dismayed he rode a week later into the mining town of El Tigre.

A dozen houses sited senselessly along a slope overlooking a small mountain valley. There was no one about. He sat the horse in the middle of the mud street and the horse stared bleakly at the town, at the rude jacales of mud and sticks with their cowhide doors. He put the horse forward and a woman came out into the street and approached him and stood at his stirrup and looked up into the child’s face under the hat and asked if he were sick. He said that he was not. That he was only hungry. She told him to get down and he did so and slid the bow from his shoulder and hung it over the horn of the saddle and followed her down to her house while the horse walked behind.

He sat in a kitchen that was all but dark so sheltered was it from the sun and he ate frijoles from a clay bowl with a huge spoon of enameled tin. The sole light fell from a smokehole in the ceiling and the woman knelt there at a low clay brasero and turned tortillas on a cracked and ancient clay corral while the thin smoke rose up the blackened wall and vanished overhead. He could hear chickens clucking outside and in a room darker yet beyond a curtain of pieced sacking some sleeper was sleeping. The house smelled of smoke and rancid grease and the smoke bore the faintly antiseptic odor of piñon wood. She turned the tortillas with her bare fingers and put them on a clay plate and brought them to him. He thanked her and folded one of the tortillas and dipped it into the beans and ate.

De dónde viene?, she said.

De los Estados Unidos.

De Tejas?

Nuevo Mexico.

Que undo, she said.

Lo conoce?

No.

She watched him eat.

Es minero, she said.

Vaquero.

Ay, vaquero.

When he’d finished and wiped the bowl clean with the last piece of tortilla she took the dishes and carried them across the room and put them in a bucket. When she came back she sat down on the slab‑board bench across the table from him and studied him. Adónde va? she said.