The women at the cookfire regarded them with little interest where they stood at the edge of the glade in their newly laundered rags. An old man and a young boy were playing homemade violins and the boy stopped playing but the old man played on. The Tarahumara had watered here a thousand years and a good deal of what could be seen in the world had passed this way. Armored Spaniards and hunters and trappers and grandees and their women and slaves and fugitives and armies and revolutions and the dead and the dying. And all that was seen was told and all that was told remembered. Two pale and wasted orphans from the north in outsized hats were easily accommodated. They sat on the ground a little apart from the others and ate from tin plates too hot to hold a kind of succotash in which they recognized the seeds of squash and mesquite beans and bits of wild celery. They ate with the plates balanced on the insides of their boots where they’d drawn them up before them heel to heel. While they were eating a woman came from the fire and dished up from a gourd a brickcolored mucilage made from God knew what. They sat looking at it. There was nothing to drink. No one spoke. The indians were dark almost to blackness and their reticence and their silence bespoke a view of a world provisional, contingent, deeply suspect. They had about them a wary absorption, as if they observed some hazardous truce. They seemed in a state of improvident and hopeless vigilance. Like men committed upon uncertain ice.
When they’d done eating they said their thanks and withdrew. Nothing was acknowledged. Nothing spoken. As they passed out through the trees Billy looked back but not even the children had been watching them leave.
The Tarahumara moved on in the evening. A great quiet settled over the glade. Billy took the shotgun and walked out through the grass with the dog and studied the country in the long red twilight. The lean and tallowcolored cattle watched from the cottonwoods and acacia and snorted and went trotting. There was nothing to shoot save the little ringdoves coming in to water and he would not waste a shell on them. He stood on a slight rise out on the prairie and watched the sun set beyond the mountains to the west and he walked back in the dark and in the morning they caught the horses and saddled Bird and set out once more.
They reached the Mormon settlement at Colonia Juárez in the late afternoon and rode the horses through the orchards and vineyards and picked apples from the trees and put them in their clothing. They crossed the Casas Grandes River on the narrow plank bridge and rode past the tidy whitewashed clapboard houses. Trees lined the little street and the houses were kept with garden and lawn and white picket fences.
What kind of a place is this? Boyd said.
I dont know.
They rode on to the end of the street and when they turned the first bend in the narrow dusty road they were on the desert again as if the little town were no more than a dream. In the evening on the road to Casas Grandes they rode past the walled ruins of the ancient mud city of the Chichimeca. Among those clay warrens and mazes there burned here and there in the dusk the fires of squatters and where the squatters rose and moved about they cast their shadows lurching across the crumbling walls like drunken stewards and the moon rose over the dead city and shone upon the terraced embattlements and shone upon the roofless crypts and the pitovens and upon the mud corrals and upon the darkened ballcourt where nighthawks were hunt?ing and upon the dry acequias where bits of pottery and stone tools together with the bones of their makers lay enleavened in the cracked clay floors.
They rode into Casas Grandes across the high banked tracks of the Mexican Northeast Railroad and they rode past the depot and up the street and tied their horses in front of a cafe and entered. Screwed into their receptacles in the ceiling and casting a hard yellow light over the tables were the first electric lightbulbs they’d seen since leaving Agua Prieta on the Ameri?can border. They sat at a table and Boyd took off his hat and put it on the floor. There was no one in the place. After a while a woman came from behind the curtained doorway at the rear and walked over and stood at their table and looked down at them. She had no pad to write on and there seemed to be no menu. Billy asked her if she had any steaks and she nodded and said that she did. They ordered and sat looking out the small window at the darkened street where the horses stood.
What do you think? Billy said.
About what?
About anything.
Boyd shook his head. His thin legs stretched out before him. On the far side of the street a family of Mennonites passed along before the dimly lighted shopfronts in their overalls with the women behind them in their sunfaded motherhubbards carrying marketbaskets.
You aint sullin up on me are you?
No.
What are you thinkin?