Red Sky at Morning (8 page)

"Now don't you start on it," I told him.

"Just bein' friendly," he said. "Forget it." The bell rang in the playground just then. "Let's go on in and sing that cute little song about the caterpillar," Parker said. "Somebody told me Miss Rudd's got on red lace pants today, and I love music just as well as the next man."

I tried to catch Marcia's eye during the singing, but she was too busy staring at Bucky. After the last class I saw her walking with him. I would have thrown a rock at him, but I might have hit Marcia.

There was no one around for me to walk with. Steenie said he was going to his father's office to pick up some more books on childbirth or venereal disease. Parker had a special package to get at the post office, something he said he'd ordered all the way from Tennessee. The Cloyd girls had probably found a couple of guys with motorcycles. I started home alone.

Camino Tuerto crosses an
acequia,
an irrigation canal, at the bottom of the hill, and Chango Lopez was sitting on the stone bridge railing, waiting for me. He'd been giving me nothing but lip for more than a week, and wasn't making me as nervous as before. I was beginning to believe he was all talk. "Hallo, you sissy queer
pendejo
bahstair."

I stopped near him. "Chango, why don't you go get a haircut. You're getting grease all over your collar." It wasn't very sharp, but it was the only thing that came to me.

Chango whistled through his teeth, and another boy crawled out from under the bridge—the
acequia
was empty at the time—and began to climb the bank. He was a stranger, but mean-looking, with pocks on his face and half a right ear. There wasn't any point, that I could see, in staying around for a discussion. I pushed Chango in the chest, and he fell backwards into the
acequia
as I started running.

Home was uphill, a bad slope to run, so I turned left along Camino Chiquito, which paralleled the canal, and ground down the dusty road between high adobe walls. Driveways cut the walls on both sides, and as I ran, hearing Chango yelling "Hey, Tarzan! Gat the son of a beech!" I looked down each one for a place to hide. Chango's friend was behind me when I turned my head to look. Chango himself wasn't running very fast, and was limping. He'd apparently sprained his ankle when I pushed him off the bridge. The one with the ear was in the lead, running very fast and lightly, like a gazelle. As usual, the altitude was beginning to get me; it was hard to breathe and my chest hurt.

On my right I saw a break in the wall, and a compound behind it, with a turning circle and some small houses grouped around it. I skidded into it, ran behind a house and through a patio gate, and dived behind a pile of neatly stacked piñon wood. I could hear Chango and then the other one, crunching on the gravel in the drive, and then leaving and walking back out to Camino Chiquito. The patio I was in was full of boulders, pushed against the wall and scattered around on the flagstones.

Each of the boulders was about a hundred-pounder, white or tan, and some of them were carved into heads and faces. But they weren't marble or tombstone granite. They were just big rocks, the sort that lie all over the hillsides around Sagrado. I went over to one of them; it was carved like an Indian's head, with the hair cut in bangs and a cloth band tied around it I don't know much about art, and I don't think that's what it was, but it was a professional job of carving.

The patio gate was still open where I'd busted through it. It was just good luck that Chango and his honcho hadn't noticed it, and come in to drag me from behind the woodpile. Or maybe they did their stomping only on public streets, and had a rule about not invading private property. I walked over, still panting, to the patio gate, but before I reached it I glanced into a window of the house to see if anyone had seen me. I believe that technically I was trespassing.

Inside was a naked woman, standing on a table. Her feet were slightly apart and her head was held back, her long brown hair reaching almost to her waist. She didn't seem to be doing anything, just standing there and looking at the ceiling. I turned my head and felt my face turning red, then looked back at her. She didn't appear to see me. She was pale and well-built, and it was an interesting view. I'd never seen a woman completely undressed before; it was fancier than a statue. She was talking to herself, or to someone I couldn't see. Her lips were moving, but I couldn't hear what she said. I stood in the shadow of the wall and just watched. My breathing was more regular now, and the spots before my eyes were clearing. I always got them when I ran too hard or too far without warming up, even in Mobile.

The woman relaxed and stepped off the table onto a chair, and then onto the floor. She still didn't look at me, but reached for a bathrobe hanging on the chair and put it on. Then someone came into the patio through the open gate.

"Are you a lover of art, or are you just a dirty little boy?"

A large bald man with a black mustache stood at the gate with his hands on his hips, smiling at me. His forearms, sticking out of a stained khaki shirt, were as large around as my head. There was nowhere to run to, and if he caught me I knew he could pluck me like a rose. I just stood there and tried to look like an art lover.

"She's beautiful, isn't she?" he said. He had a rich accent which sounded European, not the harsh mushy Sagrado-Spanish accent. "She can hold any pose I give her for fifty minutes and her muscles never start quivering. She doesn't mind being looked at, but she doesn't like to be leered at. Were you leering at her?"

"No sir," I managed to say. "I didn't even know she was there until. . . ."

"Until you saw her. That sounds reasonable. Would you like to come in? I think you're still frightened."

"I'm not frightened."

"You're not? If Tarzan Velarde were after me, I'd be frightened. Well, maybe I wouldn't, but most people would. You really shouldn't make enemies of the Spanish boys. They can be very cruel. Come in. Come in."

I followed him into the house, through the patio door near the woodpile. He went to the woman, who was sitting next to the table and smoking a cigarette, and said, "It's all right, Anna. He's an art lover after all. This is Anna. Anna, this is. . . ."

"Joshua M. Arnold," I said. "How do you do. I didn't mean to peek. It just took me by surprise." She blew smoke slowly at me, and didn't change her expression, which was neutral and bored. "We're going to have some coffee now, Mr. Arnold," he said. "Would you like a cup?"

"Sure. Thank you." He went over to a hot plate on a counter that ran along one side of the studio, and poured coffee from a pot into three heavy china mugs.

"I want some sugar this time, Romeo," the woman said. "I don't like it black."

"Sugar will only make you fat, Anna," he said gently. She lapsed back into neutral silence and puffed on her cigarette. I thought she was pretty, even without any lipstick on, but she looked . . . not stupid exactly, but as if she never thought about anything.

The sculptor sat with us at the table and we drank black coffee, which tasted faintly of clay. He had clay on his hands and wrists, and on his shirt and the fly on his trousers and in his ears. The statue he was sculpting was on a small pedestal and it seemed to be nearly finished. He'd caught the pose pretty well, but it still wasn't art. He saw me looking at it.

"I know," he said happily. "It isn't going to threaten the reputation of Praxiteles. When it's finished it will look like Anna, and I will sell it for a hundred dollars, maybe a hundred and fifty, and it will decorate a concrete fountain in Grosse Point, Michigan, or Bend, Oregon. I'm not a very good sculptor, but I like to do it better than carpentry. I'm a very good cabinet maker, and people tell me I could make much more money that way, but I am very bored with chairs and breakfronts and credenzas and bookshelves."

"I think it's very good," I lied. "It looks just like her."

"You can do a better likeness of her with a box camera," he said.

"I don't like it," the woman said flatly. "It doesn't have enough plastic integrity."

"Anna," he said. "Don't use words you don't understand. You're too beautiful to use words like that, and they'll give you lines on your face." He pulled back her long hair and kissed her behind the ear, and she said, "Hmmmmmm,"

We finished our coffee, and Anna went into another room to put her clothes on.

"Aren't you Ann and Frank Arnold's boy?" he asked me, and I told him I was. "Sure," he said. "I haven't seen you since you were eight or nine. Frank's an old friend of mine. Tell your mother Romeo Bonino says hello."

I promised I would. I didn't remember him, and I couldn't picture him at our house playing bridge or listening to my mother talk about her kinfolk in Atlanta and Louisville and Charleston.

"Where is Frank, by the way? I haven't seen him this year."

"He's in the Navy," I said. "He's in Massachusetts right now for training, and then he'll go overseas somewhere."

"Are you as tough as old Frank?"

"I can outrun him," I said. "I don't think I can out-wrestle him yet."

The woman, Anna, came back into the studio and without saying anything began to rattle pots and pans in the cooking corner of the room, and to slice some salami. I stood up and thanked Mr. Bonino for his coffee and for letting me hide in his patio. "Tell Mrs. Bonino I'm sorry about staring at her." The woman said "Hah!" and kept slicing salami.

"Sure, sure," he said. "Listen, when do you have to get home? Does your mother worry about you?"

"No. She doesn't worry about me. I can get home any time. If those guys don't jump me again."

"I want to take some rocks back to the mountain before dinner. It won't take long. Why don't you come with me?"

"Some what?"

"Come along. I'll show you."

We left Anna with the salami and went out to his garage. He backed an old truck to the patio gate. "We'll just take the ones with faces on them," he said.

He and I rolled and carried the boulders to the truck and hoisted them into the bed, where he'd laid some army blankets. There were seven of them, and they were heavy.

I climbed in, and he drove out between the compound walls and northeast toward Teta Peak, so called because it was shaped like a breast, with a big pink rock nipple on top of it.

"Anna isn't exactly Mrs. Bonino," he said after a few minutes. "She's more of a friend, and she models for me."

"Oh, that's okay," I said, not knowing what else I should say. "She looks very nice."

"She isn't," he said. "She's a rotten model and a bad cook, and she doesn't shave under her arms often enough and she's stupid."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Don't be. We get along very well, and when she gets tired of me, or when I get tired of her, she'll go live with someone else. I'm about number fifteen for her. She's about number twenty for me."

"Oh."

We turned off the road and onto a rutted track that led to the foot of the hill, and stopped. "Here we are," Romeo said. "Time to sweat."

We unloaded the carved boulders, and he chose the heaviest one to start with. "These came from up there," he said, pointing to a small clearing far above us. We got behind a boulder and began to roll it slowly uphill. When we came to a nearly level place we'd carry it together, but mostly we had to roll it. It was hard, sweaty work, and we were gasping when we reached the clearing. Romeo found a stick and scratched a shallow depression in the earth, and we rolled the carved rock into it so that it sat on what would have been a neck if he'd carved a neck. "Much better," he said, and we started down for another boulder.

"Frank and I used to do this, sometimes," he said. "He was one of the few people who didn't think I was crazy, and he said he liked the exercise. Do you think I'm crazy?"

"I guess not. Who are you doing this for? I mean, who owns the hill?"

"Owns the hill? Nobody owns the hill. It belongs to the state, or the Federal government, or something. It's a public hill. I'm simply improving the land."

We rolled rocks up the hill until the sun went down and it was too dark to see where we were going. Once, halfway up, with a boulder carved like a Negro's head, our hands slipped and it rolled downhill away from us, knocking over small trees. We scrambled after it, with Romeo screaming "Come back, come back, you son of a bitch!" He tripped and banged his knee on a root, and I tripped over him, and for a few seconds we lay there, laughing, and listening to the carved head crashing and bouncing down the slope. We found it ten minutes later, after a lot of thrashing around, and put our backs in it, and got it to its original spot.

"Maybe my father didn't think you were crazy," I said, as we went down for another one, "but I'm not so sure."

"As I said, I'm improving the land. I'm improving on Nature, and I don't believe I'm arrogant to say that Nature can be improved. Now a tree: As Mr. Kilmer said in his awful poem, only God can make one, and I know of few ways to improve upon trees. Cutting them down to make paper for income-tax forms, or carving them into chairs, is not really an improvement. But these boulders are an ugly shape when I find them, and Nature isn't going to make them more beautiful. All that will happen to them is that the rain and the wind will erode them, make them smaller and smaller, until they're turned into dust, which will be washed down this hill into the Rito Sagrado, and then into the Río Grande, and from there into the Gulf of Mexico. Do you see what I mean?"

"I think so."

"Good. So I beautify them myself. I take them from the mountain, temporarily, and I carve good strong faces in them, and I put them back. All of my friends and most of my relatives are on this little mountain. I'm careful to carve only admirable people."

We were exhausted when we'd rolled the last of the heads up Teta Peak, and it was dark. He drove me home, told me to be careful of Tarzan, and said to come over any time and learn to sculpt. "Any idiot can do it," he said.

Jimbob and my mother were having a little snort when I came in, a peaceful and homey scene. "Where have you been?" Mother asked, looking a little cross-eyed.