All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel (23 page)

Martha was silent. Her silence had something of the uncomfortable quality of Sally’s silences, only it was a great deal more formidable. She was a statuesque old woman, and had not put down the rifle. Her face was in shadow, but the hand and forearm that held the gun looked as brown and strong as wood.

Uncle L tried to open the screen door and it wouldn’t open. It was latched from the inside.

“What in the goddamn hell’s the matter with you?” he said, rattling the screen. “Ain’t you gonna let us in the house? We come to get fed, not to stare through a goddamn door screen.”

The old woman shifted the rifle to the crook of her arm and came slowly to the door. Her face was still in shadow.

“I don’t know that I want you in my house,” she said.

Uncle L was a little taken aback. It was obvious that he had expected a different reception.

“Since when, by God?” he asked.

“Since yesterday,” Martha said. She wasted no words—I don’t think she wasted anything.

“Lemme in,” Uncle L said, rattling the door screen. “I got a goddamn right to come in, ain’t I?”

“I don’t know that you do,” Martha said.

Her voice was as level as the desert, and about as unappeasing. I had the feeling that I had blundered into a show-down of some kind. Uncle L was literally hopping mad. I expected him to hop at any moment.

“What kinda goddamn airs are you putting on now?” he said. “I’m your husband, ain’t I?”

“We might be getting a divorce,” Martha said.

Uncle L was taken aback.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because you’re an old sonofabitch,” Martha said.

Uncle L was enraged past reply. He dug in his pocket and came out with a yellow-handled pocketknife. He opened the longest blade and jabbed it through the door screen, near the latch.

“All right, I’ll cut my way in,” he said. “I ain’t gonna stand out here and listen to you call me names.”

Martha shifted her weight and put the barrel of her rifle
against the screen, exactly covering the point of Uncle L’s knife. An instant later she fired. Fortunately Uncle L had jerked his knife back. A hole appeared in the screen and behind us there was the sudden crack of glass. The goats, some of whom had followed us onto the porch, immediately stampeded. Hundreds of small hooves drummed the earth—white forms vanished. The three of us stood and listened to them run. There was nothing left in the yard but a jeep with a shattered windshield.

Uncle L was too shocked to speak, but Martha was not shocked at all. She levered another shell into the chamber and put the rifle back in the crook of her arm.

“Just because I stood up with you don’t mean you can ruin my screens,” she said. “If I want ’em ruined I’ll ruin ’em myself. You ran over six goats last night, going home. I’d like my money in cash. Then we’ll see about supper.”

She flicked the door latch off and turned and went back to the table. It was just a plain wooden table, with a kerosene lamp sitting on it. All the chairs were plain and wooden. Martha laid the Winchester across the table and turned and planted herself, facing Uncle L. She was an angular woman, and she really did stand in the room as if she were planted there. Uncle L kicked the door back and stomped into the room, but it was obvious to all of us that he was facing his match. He was like a wildcat who had been insulted by a tree. He could gnash his teeth and bare his claws but he was not going to be able to hurt the tree, much less break it down. He hung his hat on a peg.

“I never run over six of them
going home
” he said. “I ran over two of them coming. The little shitasses are as hard to see as rocks. You don’t need to be so goddamn ornery about it.”

“If you can’t see where you’re going you oughtn’t to
drive
,” Martha said. “Why don’t you hire that boy there to drive for you? He looks like he needs a job.”

“All he needs is a haircut,” Uncle L said. “Let’s eat. I smell the cooking.”

“I’ll see the money,” Martha said. “I ain’t no rich woman. I can’t afford a husband if he’s going to run over my goats.”

Uncle L took out his billfold disgustedly. “I don’t know why in the goddamn hell I married you,” he said. “I got by eighty-nine years without no wife. All you’ve been to me is expense, expense, expense. I can’t recollect now why I was fool enough to do it.”

“Because you got tired of eating that old Mexican’s cooking,” Martha said. “A hundred dollars’ll be fair.”

Martha’s face was neither thin nor full—her features looked firmer than leather. They had the quality of bone. Her mouth was neither contemptuous nor welcoming.

“I ain’t passing out no food to a man who ain’t honest enough to admit his mistakes,” she said.

“A hundred dollars?” Uncle L said. “You can go shit in the sea. Two of them goats was cripples anyway. A goddamn accident ain’t no goddamn mistake.”

“Six accidents in one night is a mistake,” Martha said. “I’ve had enough of this talk. If you ain’t going to pay me, you can leave.”

Uncle L paid. His billfold was bulging with money, doubtless made gambling. It was his real profession. He was famous all over the West as a poker player. He gave Martha a hundred-dollar bill and sank into injured silence. That suited Martha fine. Evidently conversation was not what they had married for. Probably she was determined to outlast him and get his ranch. Probably he was determined to outlast her and get hers. The determination to outlast was the bond that joined them, just as it joined Uncle L
and Lorenzo. All of them were bound and determined not to be the first to die.

Martha brought us in buffalo steaks, cooked rare. They were served on old pewter platters. The only other dish was a stew made of beans and goat sweetbreads. Uncle L got a tumbler of whiskey and I got a glass of goat milk. The table looked like it had been used for a hundred years. Everything in the house was simple. Martha sat a flat slab of cornbread in the center of the table, and a dish of goat butter beside it.

Not one word was said during the meal, and there was no sense of sociability between the three of us at all. We were three separate people joined in the performance of what was essentially a common duty. Uncle L had told me he was Martha’s third husband, and I ate the bloody steak and peppery beans and tried to imagine what life had been like for the other two. Presumably they had actually lived with her. Her hair was iron gray, parted in the middle. The strings of muscle in her forearms were like the markings of driftwood. Her face had a certain beauty, but beauty of such a severe nature, so spare and unswerving and unself-glorifying that it hardly seemed feminine at all. After we had eaten we got scalding hot coffee, served black. When we finished that Uncle L abruptly got up and put his hat on. I mumbled a word about the meal and followed him out. Martha came out too and stood on her low porch.

“Is this boy still going to school?” she asked. “He looks peaked. Probably don’t get no exercise. I’ll hire him if you ain’t got a place for him.”

“He wouldn’t be worth a shit,” Uncle L said. “All he’s ever done is read.”

Martha stood on the porch, watching us silently. The thought of working for her was a vision of hell. I could tell she knew no variables. Life was lived in one way and one
way only. It was hard to imagine anything unnecessary happening within a certain distance of her person. I was unnecessary, and all variables. It was an immense relief not to have to justify myself in her eyes.

“Yell if you see any goats,” Uncle L said, as we drove off.

Soon we passed a small flock and he braked the jeep. “Get out and help me catch some,” he said. “She ain’t getting away with that goddamn robbery. I got some string in the back, here. You catch ’em and I’ll tie ’em up.”

There was no need to chase the goats at all. They practically leapt in the jeep. Uncle L took ten and tied their feet with string. The ten of them made quite a pile, and also quite a bit of noise.

“Sit on ’em,” Uncle L commanded. “I don’t want none falling out. I ought to steal fifty. Two dollars is enough to pay for a shitass goat.”

When we drove up on the ridge old Lorenzo was still squatting by the fire. His rifle was propped against his knee, and he was nodding. Uncle L got out and kicked him awake and the two old men took their Winchesters and went over to the edge of the rimrock again. They squatted and peered into the night, across the long barrenness to Mexico. Faint starlight lit the desert, and a wind had come up, a late norther. It was an eerie scene. The fire threw shadows on the rocks that covered the bones of El Caballo. I zipped up my parka and scrunched down, using the warm smelly goats as a windbreak. If I had been drunk the scene would have been even more eerie. Also it wouldn’t have been so cold. The wind sped and the fire threw shadows, the emptiness around me was vast and supernal and the skeins of high-flung stars were coldly beautiful. Finally Uncle L and Lorenzo gave it up. Zapata wasn’t coming for another night or two. They came back to the campfire and opened their breeches and peed on it. They didn’t even pee like old men.
Between them they put the fire out. Lorenzo kicked a little sand on it, for good measure, and in a minute we were plunging off the ridge.

As soon as we got back to the house, Uncle L and Lorenzo butchered the ten goats. I guess they were afraid Martha might come and find them. They sat around the campfire most of the night, cutting the goat meat into jerky-size slices and hanging it on the clothesline. I was not in the mood for so much butchering. I didn’t like the blood, or the washtub full of goat guts that soon accumulated. Now and then, in the darkness of the windmills, the two camels belched. Uncle L and Lorenzo were very cheerful—they had gotten away with ten goats, and they made short shrift of them.

There was nothing to do that I knew how to do, so I went up and sat on the fourth-floor balcony. The two old men were far below, cussing each other and telling stories about the Zapatistas. Neither of them seemed tired, which was very confusing. I was mortally tired. I was also mortally mortal. I always thought of Uncle L as near death, because he was ninety-two, but it was obvious to me that that was a wrong way to think. I was probably nearer death. It was as if Uncle L and Martha and Lorenzo had already contested Time and won. The contest was over. They had made life theirs. So far as life was concerned they could go on living until they got bored with living, with butchering goats and digging postholes and cooking buffalo steaks.

I felt really insubstantial. I didn’t know if I would ever make life mine. Martha was right about Uncle L, though. He was an old sonofabitch. The Hacienda of the Bitter Waters wasn’t the Old West I liked to believe in—it was the bitter end of something. I knew I would never want to visit it again.

I sat on the balcony, huddled in my parka, until Uncle L and Lorenzo finally wrapped themselves in their bedrolls and went to sleep. When I went down to leave I found the two vaqueros wide awake.

“You sure Antonio doesn’t want to go?” I asked.

“He is too crazy to go,” the humble one said. “He is a wanted man. He is always fucking people, stealing cars, drinking whiskey. Someday the Texas Rangers will get him and beat his head. Awhile ago, while the Señor Jefe was gone, he was fucking those camels. We saw him but we didn’t stop him. Many times he has threatened to kill us if we don’t leave him alone while he is fucking things.”

All the forty-seven bouncy miles the two vaqueros praised my generosity and told stories of Antonio’s filthiness. At four in the morning, with the norther still blowing, I let them out in front of a dry-goods store in Van Horn.

“Señor, you have help us,” the humble one said, tearful suddenly, either from gratitude or the cold. “You are good man.”

It made me tearful too. They were the only ones who thought so. They thanked me seven times more. The beginnings of dawn were in the east. I felt tired and ragged, but I didn’t want to sleep. I didn’t know when, if ever, I would want to sleep again.

Being very tired made certain parts of me numb, and in a way I was stronger numb. Austin was still several hundred miles away. In several hundred miles I could get tired enough to be dangerous for a little while. There was undoubtedly a fray ahead. I gunned my Chevy through the grimy, empty streets of Van Horn, thinking of Martha’s poor goats. I didn’t want to be a helpless goat. Maybe I should get drunk, as well as tired. If I didn’t I’d arrive like a goat and my guts would be in a washtub six minutes later.

Not me. I would drive myself ragged and arrive like
Zapata—after so many years in the hills the sight of me would strike terror into my foe. I gunned the Chevy up to eighty, five miles faster than it would usually go. It had risen to the occasion. I would call it El Chevy and bury it someday beneath a cairn of rocks, preferably on the banks of the Rio Grande. El Chevy and I both quivered as we streaked out of Van Horn. We were both tired, but there was nothing for it but to rush on toward the battle.

IT WAS EVENING
when I reached Austin. The norther petered out at daybreak, and El Chevy and I grew hot. It seemed almost an endless road. In almost no time I lost my spiritual momentum. Being tired was no fun, and I didn’t know if I could stay awake long enough to get tired enough to be high. It was cooler moving than it was stopped, so I kept moving and about five o’clock the buildings of Austin were there ahead of me, beyond their little lake.

I went right on to Godwin’s house, not giving myself any time to think. It was a soft, spring evening. A great many young couples walked along the sidewalks, holding hands. It was hard to understand why I wasn’t among them. Even in my flat state I was conscious enough to envy the couples.

On just such an evening, a little less than a year before, I had come driving into Austin, partly to eat Mexican food but probably mainly in hopes of meeting someone to walk along a sidewalk holding hands with. I found Sally and maybe we took two walks, holding hands. I had been a feckless student—probably as feckless as any student anywhere. Now I was a feckless nothing, author of a book I
already didn’t care about and soon to be the father of a child I couldn’t imagine.