Red Sky at Morning (5 page)

"I'll try not to set fire to it," I said.

"Good-by, Hoss,"

"Good-by."

He got into the car with Amadeo for the long drive to the train. I went into the kitchen, where Excilda was preparing lunch.

"Can I have a
burrito?"

"Say it in Spanish."

"Puedo yo have un burrito?"

"That's the way they teach it in school down there in Mobile, huh? Your father ought to get his money back."

"Dame un burrito, pues."

¿"Por favor?"

"Por favor."

Excilda gave me a
burrito.
You have to work for everything.

The night before school started I did ten push-ups in my bedroom, and had to quit. With all the sky in Sagrado there simply isn't any air in it.

Next morning, when the home-room teacher called the roll, I listened for familiar names, but the only one that rang a bell was Stenopolous. There was a Doctor Stenopolous I kept reading about in
The Conquistador,
the Sagrado newspaper, who seemed to be the only obstetrician in the area and was constantly on the jump. When local news was slow, and it generally was slow, the paper would run a baby story. "Woman Gives Birth in Mayor's Office," a headline would run, or "Baby Delivered in Wagon on Load of Melons."

At the recess break I introduced myself to William Stenopolous, Jr., a chunky, brown-haired boy who looked as Greek as Eric the Red. "Call me Steenie," he said. I asked him about athletics, and he said that Helen De Crispin High School had a track team, despite the lack of breatheable air.

"We're conditioned to it," he said. "Now, you take Swenson . . ." He pointed across the schoolyard to a tall, bulgy-looking brute surrounded by girls. "Swenson's a borderline moron and a prime horse's ass, but he has a forty-seven-inch chest. He's all lung, like those Peruvian Indians that carry grand pianos up and down the Andes."

"He seems to be in good shape," I said.

"Oh, he's got a good musculature on him," Steenie went on, "and some primitive bones to hang it on. Like all Scandinavians, he tends to run to calcium. I tried to get the calipers on him once, for some skull measurements, but he threatened to pound me. My guess is, his head's solid bone down to the center of it, where there's a cavity just big enough for his pituitary gland."

"I don't want to start off on the wrong foot," I said, "but my father's a Scandinavian clear back to Sven Fork-Beard. We're not
all
idiots."

"Don't take anything I say personally," Steenie said. "I have Sagrado-itis of the mouth." Sagrado-itis is the local name for violent diarrhea. "And there are exceptions about Scandinavians. I even heard once that Ibsen was a Norwegian. I doubt it, but that's the story." He backed away and looked at me searchingly. "You from the South?"

"Mobile, Alabama."

"There's a Negro in school here, in the tenth grade. Are you going to lynch him?"

"Not unless he tries to marry my sister," I told him. "As long as he stays in his place." -

"And calls you 'Boss'?"

"Well, sure."

"All right, then. We don't want racial trouble out here. And don't call him a Negro. He thinks he's an Anglo. We only recognize three kinds of people in Sagrado: Anglos, Indians and Natives. You keep your categories straight and you'll make out all right. Do you have anything against your sister marrying an Anglo?"

"To tell you the truth, I don't even have a sister."

"Now, you see that girl over there by the cottonwood tree? The one with the knockers?" I saw her. She would have stood out in any crowd. "What would you say she was?"

"She looks like a Creole," I said.

"Arnold, you have a lot of work ahead of you. She's a Native. Her name's Viola Lopez. She speaks Spanish and English, and she's a Catholic. Don't ever make the mistake of calling her a Mexican. Her brother will kill you. Of course, if you call her a Creole she'll get confused as hell and think you mean she's part Negro—that is, part dark-skinned Anglo—and her brother will kill you again. So think of her as a Native, unless you're comparing her with an Indian. Then she's 'white.' Got it?"

"I think so," I said. "But what about the Negro?"

"I already explained that to you. He's an Anglo. That is, he's an Anglo unless you're differentiating between him and an Indian. Then
he's
'white.' I admit he's awfully dark to be white, but that's the way it goes around here. You have to learn our little customs and folkways, or it's your ass. And if you've got any Texas blood in you, you'd better take 'spik' and 'greaser' out of your vocabulary. If there's a minority group at all around here, it's the Anglos. By the way, do you know any judo? I taught judo to a Commando class this summer."

"Aren't you a little young for that? You don't look any older than I do."

"Uncle Sam takes his talent where he finds it. There's a war on. Now, you be the Kraut and come at me with a knife." Steenie showed me some judo holds that I'd read about in
Life
magazine a year or so earlier.

"You'll learn," he said, afterward. "If the war turns against us, and we get invaded, this knowledge will come in very handy. My plan is to head up into the mountains and hold out, like Mikhailovich, harassing the enemy. I wish there was a railroad around here. I know how to blow up a railroad. You know anything about boats?"

"That's about all I do know anything about," I said.

"Do you know how to sink one?"

"Anybody can sink one. It's learning how to keep one afloat that's hard. My father told me once I'd foundered more catboats than anybody my age and weight. He said I hold the Southern Conference record in poor seamanship."

"Well," Steenie went on, "bad seamanship or not, it won't do you any good out here. That's the trouble. All this military talent going to waste. Sagrado is the worst place to fight a war I ever saw. You know, they've got people up there in La Cima"—he pointed to the mountains—"that don't even know there
is
a war. The last one they heard about was when the Spanish Armada got sunk. Second Punic, I think it was, or Jenkins's Ear."

"I think it was the War of the Roses," I said, "but I'm a little rusty on it myself."

"What does your old man do for a living?" he asked suddenly. "Mine runs a chain of whorehouses in Juarez. I helped him pick the girls for it this summer. Exhausting work, let me tell you."

"I thought you said you were teaching judo to the Commandos."

"That was the early part of the summer. No, really, what does he do?"

"He's a Navy officer right now," I said. "Before that he ran a shipyard. He built the
Serapis,
the
Bon Homme Richard
and
The Golden Hind."

Steenie thought that over. "I think you're crapping me," he said finally. "It's just what I deserve."

I had lunch that first day with Parker Holmes, leaning against a mud wall behind the school and eating from our lunch boxes. Excilda had packed mine, but Mother had supervised it: sliced ham between two slices of soggy bread, no mustard. A gangly boy with ears that reached out sideways for the most subtle sounds, Parker was munching something he claimed was elkburger, "cut off from around the brisket." His father was a game warden, and brought home lots of confiscated, illegally shot meat.

"This country," Parker said, grinding his sandwich, "abounds in game. Abounds. Elk, like this here, Rocky Mountain Mule Deer, bear, antelope, rabbit—both jackass and bunny—grouse, bandtail pigeon, snipe, rail, gallinule,
gallopavo merriami
and pea fowl. We also got the inedible, like feral dogs and pussycats,
zopilote,
fish-eating beaver and two-stripe skunk." He waved his arms to indicate vast populations of fauna. "A game biologist can go ape in this country. Ape."

In the afternoon, after a clumsy speech of welcome by the school principal, a small, pop-eyed man named Alexander who got tangled in the microphone cord and fell heavily, I found Steenie in the baked-mud schoolyard talking to a girl, medium-sized, slim with black hair and fair skin. Steenie appeared to be examining her face closely as I approached them.

"Not a blemish," she was saying. "You see? It worked."

"I still insist," Steenie said to her, "that acne is caused by psychiatric imbalance and not by chocolate malts. You could have drunk six a day and still not had a pimple. You deprived yourself for no reason."

"Well, how about this?" she said. She turned her back to him and pulled her skirt tight against her behind. "I didn't put an ounce of lard on it this summer. It's hard as a rock. No, don't touch it. Take my word for it." She saw me and smiled. "What do you think? Isn't that a pretty behind?"

"Turn around, Marcia, and I'll introduce the front part first," Steenie said. "Marcia Davidson, Jericho Arnold. Marcia's old man is rector of St. Thomas's Episcopal, but don't bother watching your language."

"It's Joshua," I said. "Jericho's where I fit the battle."

"That's a cute little scar you have," she said. "Are you sensitive about it?"

I noticed that she had dark circles under her eyes, like mice. "Did you get those shiners from asking rude questions?"

"No," she said. "They're functional. I've been getting them every month since I was twelve. Steenie's been giving me some exercises to help the cramps."

"How are they working, by the way?" he asked her.

"The cramps are better, but I still get that gicky feeling."

I knew I was beginning to turn red, and I started to get that gicky feeling myself.

"Couldn't we just talk about something else?"

"All right," Marcia said. "If it upsets you. But Steenie's my medical advisor." She said she was pleased to meet me, and walked away after shaking hands again. Her hand was cool and dry, and not gicky at all.

"Nice kid," Steenie said. "My only patient. She draws the line at examinations, of course. . . . Now, turn your back to me and bend your right arm as if you were carrying a rifle at shoulder arms. Ordinarily, I'd use a three-foot length of piano wire for this maneuver, if you were a real Kraut, but I'll let you off easy."

I turned my back and bent my arm, and he whipped his rolled handkerchief around my neck and assured me I was a dead Kraut.

When the bell rang for the last class of the first day, Steenie and I joined the herd and began to push through the double doors. There was the usual amount of shoving and bad manners and goosing and giggling; Point Clear behavior wasn't any more courtly. But in the middle of all this happy horseplay, somebody jammed an elbow into my ribs, a deliberate and painful jab.

I scanned the unfamiliar faces, most of them dusty from an hour spent on the grassless playing ground; Point Clear was lush and its grounds were closely covered in fine golf-course lawn. I saw a few faces that I recognized: Steenie, Parker, the white-haired look-alike Cloyd girls, and Viola Lopez, whom Steenie had pointed out to me because of her enormous, precocious bosom. None of these people had jabbed me in the side.

To my left, burning out of the sea of pink and tan faces, was the meanest-looking human pan I'd ever seen, a brown, flat face with hot black eyes, a mouth so thin and lipless and straight that it seemed like the slot in a piggy bank. The face was framed by rich, thick, black, shiny hair, long and carefully combed; it swept around the top half of the ears on its way to the duck's ass arrangement in back, and the sideburns reached nearly to the bend of the jawbone.

By the time I saw this last face we'd all broken through the jam-up at the door and were pouring untidily down a corridor. Hate-Face fell into step beside me, shoving gently and insistently with his shoulder.

"Jew are a fahkeen queer," he said pleasantly. "I am goeen to bahss your ass."

I brought a right up from around my ankles, forgetting what science I knew, and landed it on his cheekbone.

His head rocked back perhaps half an inch, and a small spot of red appeared on the dark tan skin. He turned the lips upward, showing handsome teeth, and said softly, through the smile, "Jew heet like a fahkeen gorl. Now I am goeen to cot you estones off." He presented an upraised middle finger to me, said
"Toma, pendejo,"
and walked away toward music class, his long arms brushing against his thighs.

My legs were quivering, and I was having some trouble getting my breath as I followed him to class, wondering whether estones meant what I thought it did. Steenie was waiting near the door.

"I don't want you to think me crude," he said, "but may I perform the autopsy? I've never had a real cadaver to cut on, and what I really want to see is whether your brain is as small as I suspect."

"I guess I started school on the wrong foot," I said.

"Let's say you've just committed suicide," he said. "Why did you pick Chango? You got something against living?"

"Chango?"

"Maximiliano Lopez. Chango is his nickname, but don't use it to his face. No, in your case it's perfectly safe to call him Chango. You're going to die anyway. It means monkey; did you notice his arms?"

"Yes," I said, "they're long."

"That's only part of it. They're strong, too. I estimate he spends three hours out of every twenty-four hanging by his hands from a branch. Sometimes, the story goes, he hangs by only one hand, while he feeds himself bananas with the other." Steenie patted me tenderly on the shoulder, and sighed. "I don't think you've learned enough Commando to protect yourself."

"Why did he jab me? He damn near broke a rib for me when we were coming in."

"Did you by any chance stare at his sister's tits today? It's a natural thing to do, of course. I did it myself, once, and got off with a chipped incisor and some minor gum damage."

A small, blonde woman with pale skin and thick glasses came out of the music room and faced us, her hands on her hips. "Are you coming in this minute, or do I tell Mr. Alexander? It's your choice."

A large clot of native boys, led by Chango Lopez, provided a chorus of loud, boisterous monotones during the singing. The woman who'd accosted us in the corridor played a chipped and out-of-tune baby grand piano in accompaniment. She never paused during the singing to correct even the most flagrant examples of poor musicianship. Chango's crew sang loudly, on only one note, and made up their own words as they went along. As they sang they passed among themselves a small book of obscene cartoons. One of Chango's friends, a bow-legged, squinty boy with boils on his neck, crept on his hands and knees to a vantage point under the piano where he could see between the pianist's legs. No one in the music room took any notice of him. The woman, Miss Rudd, gave him about a minute of uninterrupted viewing, and then removed her right foot from the hold pedal and kicked him neatly on the chin, causing him to bump his head sharply on the underside of the piano. He wobbled out from underneath, his eyes faintly crossed, and made his way back to his seat, while Chango's bunch laughed coarsely. No one paid any attention to this tableau, and I took it for daily ritual.