Cities of the Plain (31 page)

It does with me too.

There's a pawnshop ticket in the top of my footlocker. If you wanted to you could get my
gun out and keep it.

We'll get it out.

There's thirty dollars owin on it. There's some money in there too. In a brown envelope.

Dont worry about nothin now.. Just take it easy.

Mac's ring is in that little tin box. You see he gets it back. Whew. Like a sumbitch, bud.

You just hang on.

We got the little house lookin good, didnt we?

Yes we did.

You reckon you could keep that pup and kindly look after him?

You'll be there. Dont you worry now.

Hurts, bud. Like a sumbitch.

I know it. You just hang on.

I think maybe I'm goin to need that sup of water.

You just hang on. I'll get it. I wont be a minute either.

He set the candlestub in its saucer of grease on the shelf and backed out and let the
curtain fall. As he trotted out across the vacant lot he looked back. The square of yellow
light that shone through the sacking looked like some haven of promise out there on the
shore of the breaking world but his heart misgave him.

Midblock there was a small cafe just opening. The girl setting up the little tin tables
started when she saw him there, wild and sleepless, the knees of his breeches red with
blood where he'd knelt in the bloodsoaked mat.

Agua, he said. Necesito aqua.

She made her way to the counter without taking her eyes off him. She took down a tumbler
and filled it from a bottle and set it on the counter and stepped back.

No hay un vaso m‡s grande? he said.

She stared at him dumbly.

Dame dos, he said. Dos.

She got another glass and filled it and set it out. He put a dollar bill on the counter
and took the glasses and left. It was gray dawn. The stars had dimmed out and the dark
shapes of the mountains stood along the sky. He carried the glasses carefully one in each
hand and crossed the street.

When he got to the packingcrate the candle was still burning and he took the glasses both
in one hand and pushed back the sacking and crouched on his knees.

Here you go, bud, he said.

But he had already seen. He set the waterglasses slowly down. Bud, he said. Bud?

The boy lay with his face turned away from the light. His eyes were open. Billy called to
him. As if he could not have gone far. Bud, he said. Bud? Aw goddamn. Bud?

Aint that pitiful, he said. Aint that the most goddamn pitiful thing? Aint it? Oh God.
Bud. Oh goddamn.

When he had him gathered in his arms he rose and turned. Goddamn whores, he said. He was
crying and the tears ran on his angry face and he called out to the broken day against
them all and he called out to God to see what was before his eyes. Look at this, he
called. Do you see? Do you see?

The Sabbath had passed and in the gray Monday dawn a procession of schoolchildren dressed
in blue uniforms all alike were being led along the gritty walkway. The woman had stepped
from the curb to take them across at the intersection when she saw the man coming up the
street all dark with blood bearing in his arms the dead body of his friend. She held up
her hand and the children stopped and huddled with their books at their breasts. He
passed. They could not take their eyes from him. The dead boy in his arms hung with his
head back and those partly opened eyes beheld nothing at all out of that passing landscape
of street or wall or paling sky or the figures of the children who stood blessing
themselves in the gray light. This man and his burden passed on forever out of that
nameless crossroads and the woman stepped once more into the street and the children
followed and all continued on to their appointed places which as some believe were chosen
long ago even to the beginning of the world.

EPILOGUE

HE LEFT three days later, he and the dog. A cold and windy day. The pup shivering and
whining until he took it up in the bow of the saddle with him. He'd settled up with Mac
the evening before. Socorro would not look at him. She set his plate before him and he sat
looking at it and then rose and walked down the hallway leaving it untouched on the table.
It was still there when he went out through the kitchen again ten minutes later for the
last time and she was still there at the stove, bearing on her forehead in ash the
thumbprint of the priest placed there that morning to remind her of her mortality. As if
she had any thought other. Mac paid him and he folded the money and put it in his
shirtpocket and buttoned it. When are you leavin? In the mornin.

You dont have to go.

I dont have to do nothin but die. You wont change your mind?

No sir.

Well. Nothin's forever. Some things are.

Yeah. Some things are. I'm sorry Mr Mac.

I am too, Billy.

I should of looked after him better. We all should o£

Yessir.

That cousin of his got here about a hour ago. Thatcher Cole.

Called from town. He said they finally got hold of his mother.

What did she have to say?

He didnt say. He said they hadnt heard from him in three years. What do you make of that?

I dont know.

I dont either.

Are you goin to San Angelo?

No. Maybe I ought to. But I aint.

Yessir. Well.

Let it go, son.

I'd like to. I think it's goin to be a while.

I think so too.

Yessir.

Mac nodded toward his blue and swollen hand. You dont think you ought to get somebody to
look at that?

It's all right.

You've always got a job here. The army's goin to take this place, but we'll find somethin
to do.

I appreciate that.

What time will you be leavin?

Early of the mornin.

You told Oren?

No sir. Not yet.

I reckon you'll see him at breakfast.

Yessir.

But he didnt. He rode out in the dark long before daylight and he rode the sun up and he
rode it down again. In the oncoming years a terrible drought struck west Texas. He moved
on. There was no work in that country anywhere. Pasture gates stood open and sand drifted
in the roads and after a few years it was rare to see stock of any kind and he rode on.
Days of the world. Years of the world. Till he was old.

In the spring of the second year of the new millennium he was living in the Gardner Hotel
in El Paso Texas and working as an extra in a movie. When the work came to an end he
stayed in his room. There was a television set in the lobby and men his age and younger
sat in the lobby in the evening in the old chairs and watched the television but he cared
little for it and the men had little to say to him or he to them. His money ran out. Three
weeks later he was evicted. He'd long since sold his saddle and he set forth into the
street with just his AWOL bag and his blanketroll.

There was a shoe repair place a few blocks up the street and he stopped in to see if he
could get his boot fixed. The shoeman looked at it and shook his head. The sole was paper
thin and the stitching had pulled through the leather. He took it to the rear and sewed it
on his machine and returned and stood it on the counter. He wouldnt take any money for it.
He said it wouldnt hold and it didnt.

A week later he was somewhere in central Arizona. A rain had come down from the north and
the weather turned cool. He sat beneath a concrete overpass and watched the gusts of rain
blowing across the fields. The overland trucks passed shrouded in rain with the clearance
lights burning and the big wheels spinning like turbines. The eastwest traffic passed
overhead with a muted rumble. He wrapped himself in his blanket and tried to sleep on the
cold concrete but sleep was a long time coming. His bones hurt. He was seventyeight years
old. The heart that should have killed him long ago by what the army's recruiting doctors
had said still rattled on in his chest, no will of his. He pulled the blankets about him
and after a while he did sleep.

In the night he dreamt of his sister dead seventy years and buried near Fort Summer. He
saw her so clearly. Nothing had changed, nothing faded. She was walking slowly along the
dirt road past the house. She wore the white dress her grandmother had sewn for her from
sheeting and in her grandmother's hands the dress had taken on a shirred bodice and
borders of tatting threaded with blue ribbon. That's what she wore. That and the straw hat
she'd gotten for Easter. When she passed the house he knew that she would never enter
there again nor would he see her ever again and in his sleep he called out to her but she
did not turn or answer him but only passed on down that empty road in infinite sadness and
infinite loss.

He woke and lay in the dark and the cold and he thought of her and he thought of his
brother dead in Mexico. In everything that he'd ever thought about the world and about his
life in it he'd been wrong.

Toward the small hours of the morning the traffic on the freeway slacked and the rain
stopped. He sat up shivering and hitched the blanket about his shoulders. He'd put some
crackers from a roadside diner in the pocket of his coat and he sat eating them and
watching the gray light flush out the raw wet fields beyond the roadway. He thought he
heard the distant cries of cranes where they would be headed north to their summering
grounds in Canada and he thought of them asleep in a flooded field in Mexico in a dawn
long ago, standing singlefooted in the wetlands with their bills tucked, gray figures
aligned in rows like hooded monks at prayer. When he looked across the overpass to the far
side of the turnpike he saw another such as he sitting also solitary and alone.

The man raised his hand in greeting. He raised his back.

Buenos d’as, the man called.

Buenos d’as.

QuŽ tiene de comer?

Unas galletas, nada m‡s.

The man nodded. He looked away.

Podemos compartirlas.

Bueno, called the man. Gracias.

M’ voy.

But the man stood. I will come to you, he called.

He descended the concrete batterwall and crossed the roadway and climbed over the
guardrail and crossed the median between the round concrete pillars and crossed the
northbound lanes and climbed up to where Billy was sitting and squatted and looked at him.

It aint much, Billy said. He pulled the remaining few packages of crackers from his pocket
and held them out.

Muy amable, the man said.

Est‡ bien. I thought at first you might be somebody else.

The man sat and stretched out his legs before him and crossed his feet. He tore open a
package of the crackers with his eyetooth and took one out and held it up and looked at it
and then bit it in two and sat chewing. He wore a wispy moustache, his skin was smooth and
brown. He was of no determinable age.

Who did you think I might be? he said.

Just somebody. Somebody I sort of been expectin. I thought I caught a glimpse of him once
or twice these past few days. I aint never got all that good a look at him.

What does he look like?

I dont know. I guess more and more he looks like a friend.

You thought I was death.

I considered the possibility.

The man nodded. He chewed. Billy watched him.

You aint are you?

No.

They sat eating the dry crackers.

Ad—nde vas? Billy said.

Al sur. Y tœ?

Al none.

The man nodded. He smiled. QuŽ clase de hombre comparta sus galletas con la muerte?

Billy shrugged. What kind of death would eat them?

What kind indeed, said the man.

I wasnt tryin to figure anything out. De todos modos el compartir es la ley del camino,
verdad?

De veras.

At least that's the way I was raised.

The man nodded. In Mexico on certain days of the calendar it is the custom to set a place
at the table for death. But perhaps you know this.

Yes.

He has a big appetite.

Yes he does.

Perhaps a few crackers would be taken as an insult.

Perhaps he's got to take what he can get. Like the rest of us. The man nodded. Yes, he
said. That could be.

Traffic had picked up on the turnpike. The sun was up. The man opened the second package
of crackers. He said that perhaps death took a larger view. That perhaps in his
egalitarian way death weighed the gifts of men by their own lights and that in death's
eyes the offerings of the poor were the equal of any.

Like God.

Yes. Like God.

Nadie puede sobornar a la muerte, Billy said.

De veras. Nadie.

Nor God.

Nor God.

Billy watched the light bring up the shapes of the water standing in the fields beyond the
roadway. Where do we go when we die? he said.

I dont know, the man said. Where are we now?

The sun rose over the plain behind them. The man handed him back the last remaining packet
of crackers.

You can keep em, Billy said.

No quieres m‡s?

My mouth's too dry.

The man nodded, he pocketed the crackers. Para el camino, he said. I was born in Mexico. I
have not been back for many years.

You goin back now?

No.

Billy nodded. The man studied the coming day. In the middle of my life, he said, I drew
the path of it upon a map and I studied it a long time. I tried to see the pattern that it
made upon the earth because I thought that if I could see that pattern and identify the
form of it then I would know better how to continue. I would know what my path must be. I
would see into the future of my life.

How did that work out?

Different from what I expected.

How did you know it was the middle of your life?

I had a dream. That was why I drew the map.

What did it look like?

The map?

Yes.

It was interesting. It looked like different things. There were different perspectives one
could take. I was surprised.