Cities of the Plain

III

WHEN HE CROSSED at the top of the draw he smelled what the horse had been smelling. A reek of carrion wafted up on some vector of the cooling evening air. He sat the horse and turned in the saddle and tested the air with his nose but the smell had passed and vanished. He turned the horse and sat facing back down the draw and then he put the horse forward again down the narrow cattletrail. The horse watched the cattle moving out before them through the scrub and pricked his ears about.

I'll let you know what it is you need to do, John Grady told him.

A hundred yards down the far side of the draw he smelled it again and he halted the horse. The horse stood waiting.

You wouldnt scout out a dead cow for me, would you? he said.

The horse stood. He put him forward again and they rode down another quarter mile or so and the horse settled into his gait such as it was and paid no more mind to the distant cattle. A little further on and he halted the horse and tested the air. He sat the horse. Then he turned and started back up the way they'd come.

He cut for sign and finally picked up the scent ripe and strong and in the dusk he dismounted and stood looking down at the flyblown carcass of a new calf that had been dragged into the center of a ring of creosote bush in broad open country. There'd been no rain in two weeks and the dragmarks were visible across the gravel and he walked out a ways on the backtrack looking for sand or dirt where there might be a foot track but he didnt find one. He came back and picked up the reins and mounted up and looked out at the surrounding countryside to mark the spot and then rode out and back down the draw.

HE AND BILLY STOOD over the dead calf and Billy walked back out following the dragmarks and stood looking over the country.

How far out did you go? he said. Not far.

It's been a stout somethin to drag that big calf. You think it's been a lion?

No. A lion'd of covered it up. Or tried to.

They mounted up and rode out on the backtrack. They lost the track on the hard ground and picked it up again. Billy followed the track over the gravels by raising or lowering his head and catching a certain angle of the light. He said that the disturbed ground had a different look and after a while John Grady could see it too. The day was cool. The horses were fresh with the morning and the weather and seemed unworried.

Range riders, said Billy. Range riders.

Detectives. Pinkertons. The calf had been cut out and run down and killed in open country. Billy dismounted and walked over the ground. There was blood on the rocks, black from the sun.

You dont think it's just been coyotes? said John Grady. I dont think so.

What do you think it's been? I know what it's been.

What?

Dogs.

Dogs?

Yep.

I aint never seen any dogs out here.

I aint either. But they're here.

In the days that followed they found two more dead calves. They rode the Cedar Springs pasture and they crossed the floodplain below it and they rode the surrounding traprock bluffs and the mesa that ran east toward the old mine. They found tracks of the dogs but they did not see them. Before the week was out they'd found another freshkilled calf not dead a day.

There were some old Oneida number three doublespring traps on a shelf in the saddleroom and Billy boiled and waxed them and they carried them out the next day and buried three of them around the carcass. They rode out before daybreak to check the sets and when they got to the kill the traps were all dug out and lying on the ground. One of them was not even sprung. The carcass itself was little more than skin and bones.

I didnt know dogs were that smart, said John Grady.

I didnt either. They probably didnt know we were that dumb.

You ever trap dogs before?

No.

What do you want to do?

Billy picked up the unsprung trap and reached under the jaw and sprang it with his thumb. It chopped shut with a dead metal sound in the quiet morning air. He cut the wires and wired the rings together and hung the traps over the horn of his saddle and mounted up. He looked at John Grady.

We just aint found where they're usin is all. They might walk in a blind set.

You think Travis's dogs would run em?

Billy sat looking out at the long morning light on the rocks of the mesa. I dont know, he said. That's a pretty good question.

They took a packhorse and carried a kitchen box and their soogans out to the mesa and made camp. They sat drinking coffee from tin cups and watching the coals flare and lapse in the wind's fanning of them. Far out on the plain below the lights of the cities lay shimmering in their grids with the dark serpentine of the river dividing them.

I thought you had other business to attend to, Billy said.

I do.

You think it can wait.

I hope it can wait. I aint sure this can.

Well I'm glad you aint forgot all of your raising.

I aint forgot anything.

You're tired of me gettin on your ass though.

You're entitled.

They sipped their coffee. The wind blew. They pulled their blankets about their shoulders.

I aint jealous you know.

I never said you were.

I know. You might of thought it. Truth is, I wouldnt pull your boots on at gunpoint.

I know.

Billy lit a cigarette with a brand from the fire and laid the brand back. He smoked. It looks a lot better from up here than it does down there, dont it?

Yes. It does.

There's a lot of things look better at a distance.

Yeah?

I think so.

I guess there are. The life you've lived, for one.

Yeah. Maybe what of it you aint lived yet, too.

They stayed out Saturday and they rode the country under the rim Sunday morning and midday they found a freshkilled calf lying in a gravel wash out on the floodplain. The mother was standing looking at it and they hazed her away and she walked off bawling and stood and looked back.

Them oldtime brocklefaces wouldnt of give up a calf thataway, Billy said. I'll bet they aint a mark on her.

I'll bet there aint either, said John Grady.

You aint good for nothin but to eat and shit, are you? Billy told the cow. The cow stared dully.

You know they're holed up in them rocks somewhere under the rim.

Yeah. I know it. But you'd have a hell of a time tryin to ride it and I sure aint goin to walk it.

John Grady looked down at the dead calf. He leaned and spat. What do you want to do?

Why dont we just pack up and ride back and call Travis and see what he says.

All right. If he'd come out this evenin we could lay for em.

Well he wont be comin out this evenin, I can tell you that.

Why is that?

Shit, said Billy. That old man wont hunt on a Sunday.

John Grady smiled. What if our ox was in the ditch?

He wouldnt give a damn if the whole outfit was in the ditch and you and me and Mac with it.

Maybe he'd just let us borrow the dogs.

He wouldnt do that. Anyways the dogs wont hunt on Sunday either. They're Christian dogs.

Christian dogs.

Yep. Raised that way.

As they rode out along the upper end of the floodplain they heard another cow bawl and they halted and sat their horses and scanned the country below them.

Do you see her? said Billy.

Yeah. Yonder she is.

Is it that same one?

No.

Billy leaned and spat. Well, he said. You know what that means. You want to ride down there?

I dont see what would be the use in it.

THEY SET OUT across the broad creosote flats of the valley in the darkness before dawn on Tuesday. Archer had a set of six dogboxes that fitted atop the bed of the Reo truck they drove and the truck groaned along in low gear and the headlights swung up and down in pale yellow fulcrums picking up the riders that went before them in the dark and the shapes of the creosote bushes and the red eyes of the horses where they turned their heads or crossed ahead of the truck. The dogs jostling in their boxes rode in silence and the riders smoked or talked quietly among themselves. Their hats low, the corduroy collars of their duckingjackets turned up. Riding slowly up the broad flat valley ahead of the truck.

The truck pulled up in a gravel fan at the head of the valley and the riders dismounted and dropped the reins on their horses and helped Travis and Archer unload the dogs and snap them onto the big harnessleather gangleads. The dogs backed and danced and whined and some raised their mouths and howled and the howls echoed off of the rimrock and back again and Travis halfhitched the first cast of dogs to the front bumper of the truck where their collective breath clouded whitely in the headlamps and the horses standing along the edge of the dark stamped and snorted and leaned to test the yellow lightbeams with their noses. They handed down the dogs by their collars from the boxes on the other side of the truck and leashed them up as well and the stars in the east began to dim out one by one.

They walked the dogs baying out along the gravel and Billy and John Grady rode below them and cut back and forth until they located the dead calf in the wash. It had been eaten to the bones and the bones had been dragged about over the ground. The ribcage lay with its curved tines upturned on the gravel plain like some great carnivorous plant brooding in the barren dawn.

They called out to the doghandlers and Travis called back to the others and they came down the wash with the big bluetick and treeing walker hounds lunging at their leads and slobbering and sucking at the air with their noses. When they fetched up at the remains of the calf they drew back and shied and sniffed the ground and looked at Travis.

Keep the horses back, called Travis. Let's give em a chance.

He set about unleashing the dogs and urging them on. They padded about snuffing at the ground and the dogs that Archer was bringing down began to howl and moan and Archer turned them loose and they came barreling down the draw.

Travis walked over to where Billy sat his horse. He stood with the leads braided up together and slung across his shoulder and listened.

What do you think? said Billy.

I dont know.

I'll bet them calfkillin sons of bitches aint been gone from here long.

I bet they aint either.

What do you think?

I dont know. If Smoke wont run em they aint goin to be run. Is that your best dog?

No. But he's the dog for the job.

Why is that?

Cause he's run dogs before.

What did he think about it?

He never said.

The dogs were casting about in the dark, returning and setting out again.

It looks to me like they've left out of here in ever direction. How many are they up here do you reckon?

I dont know. Three or four.

I'll bet they's moren that.

You may be right.

Yonder he goes now.

One of the dogs had sorted out the track and set off baying. The others came tearing out of the creosote and within seconds all eight hounds were in full cry.

That sounds pretty hot on that dry ground, said Travis. Where's my horse at?

JC did have him but I think he's gone on.

You know where they're headed dont you?

Up towards them rocks under the mesa yonder I'd say.

Archer came leading Travis's horse by the bridlereins. Travis stepped up into the saddle and looked toward the east. It's about to get light enough to see.

There's goin to be one godawful dogfight up in them rocks. I hear you. Let's go boys.

John Grady and JC were sitting their horses at the upper end of the wash when Archer and Travis and Billy rode up.

Where's Troy and Joaquin?

Done gone on.

Let's go.

You hear that?

What?

Listen.

From the rimrock of the far western edge of the floodplain beyond the cries of the trailing hounds they could hear short chopping barks, a balesome howling.

Them ignorant sons of bitches is answerin back, said Billy.

I guess they want to be in on the race, Archer said. Dumb sumbucks dont know they are the race.

By the time they reached the foot of the stone palisades the hounds had already driven the dogs out of the rocks and they could hear them in a running fight and then a long howling chase up through the broken scree and boulders. It was by now gray light and they trotted the horses singlefile along the base of the cliffs, following a trail that wound among the fallen traprock. Travis put his horse alongside John Grady. He reached and put his hand on the horse's neck and John Grady slowed.

Listen, said Travis.

They halted and sat the horses and listened. Billy rode up.

Build your loops, boys, Travis said.

Think you all can see to rope?

We're fixin to find out.

They pulled the ties on their catchropes. Let's dont get in hurry, said Travis. They're fixin to break out up here. Let em get out in the clear. Be careful now. Let's not rope our own dogs.

They ran their loops and nudged their horses forward.

Keep em small, said Travis. Keep em small. They'll go through one like a dose of salts through a cat.

The hounds' cries were suddenly just above them where the trail turned and angled up behind some large fallen boulders They saw three shapes leaping from rock to rock. Then two more. John Grady was riding Watson's blue dun horse and he put his heels to the horse's ribs and the horse squatted and bolted. Billy was right behind him.

The trailing hounds came out of the rocks above them in full cry and John Grady reined off to the right. Both he and Billy were sitting up high in the saddle in an effort to see the running dogs. When they came out onto the upper trail John Grady looked back. Billy was whipping over and under with the small toy loop of his catchrope. A hundred feet behind him among the rocks several of Travis's appaloosacolored dogs were coming hard. He leaned low over the horse's neck to talk it on and then raised up again to see. Three yellowlooking dogs were loping dead ahead in tandem before him up a long gravel wash. He leaned and spoke again to the horse but the horse had already seen them. He glanced back to check for Billy and when he looked ahead again the hindmost dog had broken away from the other two. He put the horse down the slope and went pounding out over the flat after it.

The loop being so small had no weight to it and he doubled it and swung it over his head and then caught it and doubled it again. When the horse saw the rope loft past its left ear it laid back its ears and came hauling down upon the running cur with its mouth open like some terrible vengeance.

The dog had no experience as quarry. It did not check or swerve but ran on and John Grady cranked the loop and leaned over the pommel of the saddle. He looked for the dog to cut back but the dog seemed to think it could outrun the horse. The coiled rope sailed out and the loop swiveled out of its turnings. The dun horse tossed up its head and set its forefeet in the gravel and squatted and John Grady dallied the home end of the rope about the polished leather of the pommel and the rope popped taut and the dog snapped into the air mutely. It cartwheeled soundlessly and landed on the gravel with a soft dead whump.

By now three more dogs had started across the plain with Travis and Joaquin after them. They passed a hundred feet out riding hard and John Grady punched the dun forward and set out after them with the yellow dog bouncing behind over the rocks and through the creosote at the end of the thirtyfive foot maguey rope. Other hounds and riders had come out of the rocks to the west and were lined out upon the floodplain and he rode on dragging the dog a ways and then hauled the horse up short and jumped down and ran back to get his rope off of the dog. The dog was limp and bloody and it lay in the gravels grinning with its eyes half started from their sockets. He stood on it with his boot and pulled off the loop and trotted back to the waiting horse coiling the rope as he went.

By this time it was good daylight and there were already four riders out on the plain before him riding in a long sweep and he mounted up and slung the coiled rope over his shoulder and set out after them at a handgallop.

When he passed Joaquin the Mexican shouted something after him but he couldnt hear what it was. He quirted the horse on with the loop end of the rope, following Travis and JC and Travis's hounds. He almost ran over one of the outlaw dogs. It had crawled up and hidden in a clump of greasewood and he would have ridden past it had it not lost its nerve at the last moment and bolted. He reined the horse around so hard he nearly lost a stirrup. Billy came up on his right and passed him and the dog cut back and tried to cross in front of his horse and as it did so Billy rode it down and leaned and roped it and the horse squatted and slid to a stop in a boil of dust and the dog went sailing and bounced and skidded and then scrambled up and stood looking about. Billy turned his horse and pulled the dog down but it got up again and began to run at the end of the rope. When John Grady went past the dog was standing and twisting and pawing at the rope but Billy put his heels to the horse and the dog was snatched away. Out on the floodplain Joaquin was sawing his horse about and whooping and the dogs were scattered and baying and fighting. Travis rode up swinging his loop and John Grady reined to one side but the dog he was after cut in front of the horse and suddenly appeared in front of him. He put the horse after it and the dog tried to cut back but he swung his loop and dallied and reined the horse to the right. The dog spun in the air and landed and rose running and turned and was snatched up again. John Grady spurred the dun forward and the dog went bouncing and slamming mutely in a wide arc and then went dragging through the brush and gravel behind him.

He came back trailing the empty rope, paying it up and recoiling it as he rode. Travis and Joaquin and Billy were sitting the horses and letting them blow. The second cast of hounds were now tracking the dogs along the lower end of the floodplain, running them down among the boulders and scree and fighting and going on again. Joaquin was grinning.

I hogged your all's dog, I reckon, John Grady said.

Plenty of dogs, Joaquin said.

Watch JC, Billy said. Watch him now. He looks like he's fightin bees.

How many of these damn dogs are there?

I dont know. Archer started up a whole other bunch yonder where that big wash comes out.

Have they caught any?

I dont think so. Troy's afoot up in them rocks.

Two hounds appeared out of the chaparral and circled and sniffed the ground and stood uncertainly.

Hyeah, called Travis. Hunt em up.

Well pardner if your horse aint bottomed out completely why dont we ride on down there where the fun's at?

Billy booted his horse forward. You aint waitin on me, he said.

You all go on, said Travis. I'll catch you up.

Dogropers, called Billy. I knew it'd come to this.

Joaqu'n grinned and pressed his horse into a lope and raised one fist over his head. Adelante, muchachos, he called.

Perreros.

Tonteros.

Travis watched them go. He shook his head and leaned and spat and turned his horse to ride up toward where he'd last seen Archer.

Where they came up off the desert parkland there were great boulders fallen from the mesa above and they rode up the slope among them until John Grady halted his horse and held up his hand. They stopped to listen. John Grady stood in the saddle and scanned the slope above them. Billy rode up.

I think they're headed up towards the top of the mesa.

I do too.

Can they get up there?

I dont know. Probably. They seem to think so.

Can you see them?

No. There was one big yellow son of a bitch and another kindly spotted one. There may be three or four of em.

I guess they've thrown the dogs, aint they?

It looks like it.

You think we can get up there?

I think I might know a way.

Billy squinted up at the stone ramparts. He leaned and spat. I'd hate to get a horse half way up that draw and not be able to go either way.

So would I.

Plus I dont know how much good we're goin to do runnin these varmints without dogs. Do you?

We just need to get up there before they get gone. It's pretty open country up on top.

Well, lead on then.

All right.

Let's not get in too big a hurry.

All right.

Let's just cover the ground in front of us. Let's not get in a jackpot up here.

All right.

He followed John Grady back down the way they'd come and they rode for the better part of a mile and then turned up along the wash. The way grew steep, the path more narrow. They dismounted and led the horses. They crossed gray bands of midden soil from ancient campsites washed down out of the arroyo that carried bits of bone and pottery and they passed under pictographs upon the rimland boulders that bore images of hunter and shaman and meetingfires and desert sheep all picked into the rock a thousand years and more. They passed beneath a band of dancers holding hands like paper figures scissored out by children and stenciled on the stone. Under the caprock was a running shelf and they turned and looked back down over the floodplain and the desert. Troy was riding out toward Travis and JC and Archer and they were crossing toward the truck with most of the dogs in tow. They couldnt see Joaqu'n anywhere. In the distance they could see the highway through a gap in the low hills fifteen miles away. The horses stood blowing.

Where to now, cowboy? said Billy.

John Grady nodded toward the country above them and set out again leading the horse.

The shelf narrowed upward to a break in the strata of the rock and they led the horses into a defile so narrow that Billy's horse balked and would not follow. It backed and jerked at the bridlereins and skittered dangerously on the shales. Billy looked up the narrow passageway. The sheer rock walls rose up into the blue sky.

Bud are you real sure about this?

John Grady had dropped the reins on the blue horse and he peeled out of his jacket and made his way back to Billy.

Take my horse, he said.

What?

Take my horse. Or Watson's. He's been through here before.

He took the reins from Billy and calmed the horse and tied the jacket by the sleeves over the horse's eyes, leaning against the animal with his whole body. Billy worked his way up to where the dun horse stood and took up the reins and led it on up through the rocks, the horse scrabbling in the shale, the loose spurs clinking off the stone. At the top of the defile the horses lunged and clambered up and out onto the mesa and stood trembling and blowing. John Grady pulled the jacket off the horse's head and the horse blew and looked about. A mile away on the mesa three of the dogs were loping and looking back.

You want to ride that good horse? said John Grady.

Let me ride this good horse.

Well yonder they go.

They set off across the open tableland with their ropes popping and loud cries, leaning low in the saddle, riding neck and neck. In a mile they'd halved the dogs' lead. The dogs kept to the mesa and the mesa widened before them. If they'd kept to the rim they might have found a place to go down again where the horses could not follow but they seemed to think they could outrun anything that cared to follow and run they did, two of them side by side and the third behind, their long dogshadows beside them in the sun racing brokenly over the sparse taupe grass of the tableland.

Billy overhauled them on the dun horse before they could separate and leaned and roped the hindmost dog. He didnt even dally the rope but just caught two turns about his wrist and gave a yank and snatched the dog from the ground and rode on dragging it behind the horse with the rope in one hand.

He overtook the dogs again and rode past so as to head them. The running dogs looked up, their eyes lost, their tongues lolling. Their dead companion came sliding up beside them at the end of the trailing rope. Billy looked back and reined the horse to the right and dragged the dead dog in front of them and headed them in a long running arc. John Grady was coming hard across the mesa and Billy brought the dun horse to a halt in a series of hops and jumped down and freed his noose from the dog and rewound it on the run and mounted up again.

He reached the dogs first and snapped his loop around the big yellow dog in the lead. The speckled dog cut back almost under the horse's legs and headed toward the rim. The yellow dog rolled and bounced and got up again and continued running with the noose about its neck. John Grady came riding up behind Billy and swung his rope and heeled the yellow dog and quirted the horse on with the doubled rope end and then dallied. The slack of Billy's catchrope hissed along the ground and stopped and the big yellow dog rose suddenly from the ground in headlong flight taut between the two ropes and the ropes resonated a single brief dull note and then the dog exploded.

The sun was not an hour up and in the flat traverse of the light on the mesa the blood that burst in the air before them was as bright and unexpected as an apparition. Something evoked out of nothing and wholly unaccountable. The dog's head went cartwheeling, the ropes recoiled in the air, the dog's body slammed to the ground with a dull thud.

Goddamn, said Billy.

There was a long whoop from down the mesa. Joaqu'n was riding toward them with three of the blueticks. He'd seen them heel and head the dog and he waved his hat laughing. The hounds loped beside the horse. They still hadnt seen the spotted dog making for the rim of the mesa.

Ayeee muchachos, called Joaqufn. He whooped and laughed and leaned and hazed his hat at the heeling dogs.

Damn, said Billy. I didnt know you was goin to do that.

I didnt either.

Son of a bitch. He hauled his rope toward him, coiling it as it came. John Grady rode out to where the dog's headless body lay in the bloodstained grass and dismounted and freed his rope from the animal's hindquarters and mounted up again. The hounds came up circling the carcass and sniffing at the blood with their hackles up. One of them circled John Grady's horse and then backed and stood baying him but he paid it no mind. He coiled his rope and turned and dug his heels into the horse's flanks and set out across the mesa after the lone remaining dog. Joaquin by now had also seen the dog and he came riding after it, quirting his horse with the doubled rope and shouting to the dogs. Billy sat watching them go. He coiled the rope and tied it and wiped the blood from his hands on the leg of his jeans and then sat watching the race head out along the edge of the mesa. The spotted dog seemed to see no way down from the tableland and it looked to be tiring as it loped along the rim. When it heard the hounds it turned upcountry again and crossed behind Joaquin and Joaquin brought his horse around and in a flat race overtook it and roped it in less than a mile of ground. Billy rode out to the rimrock and dismounted and lit a cigarette and sat looking out over the country to the south.

They came riding back across the mesa with the hounds at the horses' heels. Joaquin trailed the dead dog through the grass at the end of his rope. The dog was bloody and half raw and its eyes were glazed and its lolling tongue was stuck with chaff and grass. They rode up to the rimrock and Joaquin dismounted and retrieved his rope from the dead dog.

Got some pups here somewhere, he said.

Billy walked up and stood looking at the dog. It was a bitch with swollen teats. He walked over and got his horse and mounted up and looked back at John Grady.

Let's take that long way back. Crawlin through them rocks gives me the fidgets.

John Grady had taken off his hat and set it in the fork of the saddle before him. His face was streaked with blood and there was blood on his shirt. He passed the back of his sleeve across his forehead and picked up his hat and put it on again. That's all right by me, he said. Joaquin? Sure, said Joaquin. He eyed the sun. We'll be back for dinner. You think we got em all? Hard to say. I'd say we broke a few of em of their habits. I'd say we did too. How many of Archer's dogs come up here with you? Three. Well we aint got but two. They turned in their saddles and scanned the mesa. Where do you reckon he's got to? I dont know, said Joaquin. He could of gone down the far side yonder. Joaquin leaned and spat and turned his horse. Let's go, he said. He could be anywheres. There's always one that dont want to go home.

IT WAS STILL DARK In the morning when John Grady woke him. He groaned and turned and put the pillow over his head. Wake up, cowboy. What the hell time is it? Fivethirty. What's wrong with you? You want to see if we can find them dogs? Dogs? What dogs? What the hell are you talkin about? Them pups. Shit, said Billy. John Grady sat in the doorway and propped one boot against the frame.Billy? he said. What, damn it.

We could ride up there and take a look around.

He rolled over and looked at John Grady sitting sideways in the door in the dark. You're makin me completely crazy, he said.

Cut for sign. I guarantee you we could find em.

You couldnt find em.

We could get a couple of dogs from Travis.

Travis wont loan his dogs. We done been through all that.

I know about where that den's at.

Why wont you let me sleep?

We could be back by dinnertime. I guarantee you.

I'm beggin you to leave me alone, son. Beggin you. I dont want to have to shoot you. I'd never hear the end of it from Mac.

Where the dogs struck that first time just below that big slide of gravel? I'll bet we rode within fifty feet of that den. You know they're in those big rocks.

THEY RODE OUT carrying across the pommels of their saddles a longhanded spade, a mattock, a fourfoot iron prybar. Socorro had come to her door in wrapper and hairpapers while they were finding something to eat and shooed them to the table while she cooked eggs and sausage and made coffee. She packed their lunch while they ate.

Billy looked out the window to where the horses stood saddled at the kitchen door. Let's eat and get gone, he said. And do not tell her where we're goin.

All right.

I dont want to have to listen to it.

They crossed into the Valenciana pasture before the sun was up and rode past the old well. The cattle moved off before them in the gray halflight. Billy rode with the spade over his shoulder. I'll tell you one thing, he said.

What's that.

There's places up in them rocks where if they are denned you damn sure wont dig em out.

Yeah. I know it.

When they reached the trail along the western edge of the floodplain the sun was up behind the mesa and the light that overshot the plain crossed to the rocks above them so that they rode out the remnant night in a deep blue sink with the new day falling slowly down about them. They rode to the upper end and came back slowly, Billy in the lead studying the ground at either side of the horse, leaning with his forearm across the horse's withers.

Are you a tracker? said John Grady.

I'm a trackin fool. I can track lowflyin birds.

What do you see?

Not a damn thing.

The sun came down the rocks and over the broken ground toward them. They sat the horses.

They been runnin these cowtracks, Billy said. Or did run. I dont think they were all denned together. I think there was two separate bunches.

That could be.

Any close place like that right yonder?

Yeah?

There's doghair on ever rock. Let's just circle up here and keep our eyes open.

They came back up the valley close under the wall among the boulders and scree. They circled among the rocks and studied the ground. It was weeks since the last rain and what dogtracks had been printed in the clay trails below them had long since been trodden out by the cattle and in the dry ground the dogs made no track at all.

Let's go back up here, said Billy.

They rode along the upper slope close under the rock bluffs. They crossed the gravel slide and rode under the old shamans and the ledgerless arcana inscribed upon those outsize tablets.

I know where they're at, Billy said.

He turned the horse on the narrow trail and rode back down through the rocks. John Grady followed. Billy halted and dropped the reins and stood down. He passed afoot through a narrow place in the rocks and then he came back out again and pointed down the hill.

They've come in here from three sides, he said. Down yonder the cows have come right up to the rocks but they cant get in. See that tall grass?

I see it.

Reason it's tall is the cows couldnt get in there to eat it.

John Grady dismounted and followed him into the rocks. They walked up and back and they studied the ground. The horses stood looking in.

Let's just set a while, said Billy.

They sat. Within the rocks it was cool. The ground was cold. Billy smoked.

I hear em, John Grady said.

I do too.

They rose and stood listening. The mewling stopped. Then it began again.

The den was in a corner of the rocks and it angled back under a boulder. They lay on their bellies in the grass and listened.

I can smell em, Billy said.

I can too.

They listened.

How are we goin to get em out?

Billy looked at him. You aint, he said.

Maybe they'll come out.

What for?

We could get some milk and set it out for them.

I dont think they'll come out. Listen at how young they are. I'll bet their eyes aint open. What do you want with em anyway? he said.

I dont know. I hate leavin em down there.

We might could twist em out. Get a ocotillo long enough.

John Grady lay peering into the darkness under the rock. Let me have your cigarette, he said.

Billy handed it across.

There's another entrance, John Grady said. There's air blowin out of this one. See the smoke?

Billy reached and took the cigarette. Yeah, he said. But the den is still under that rock and the rock's the size of Mac's kitchen.

A kid could crawl down in there.

Where you goin to get a kid at? And suppose he got stuck down in there?

You could tie a rope to his legs.

They'd tie one to your neck if anything happened to him. Let me have your knife.

John Grady handed him his pocketknife and he rose and went off and after a while he came back with an ocotillo branch. It was a good ten feet long and he sat and trimmed the thorns off the lower couple of feet for a handhold and then they lay and took turns for the next half hour with the ocotillo down in the hole turning it in an effort to twist up the fur of the pups in the thorns.

We dont even know if this is long enough, Billy said.

I think what it is is that the hole's too big down there. You'd have to run the end of it underneath them some way to do any good and that would just be luck.

I aint heard one of em squeal for a while.

They might of moved back in a corner or somethin.

Billy sat up and pulled the ocotillo out of the hole and examined the end of it.

Is there any hair on it?

Yeah. Some. But there probably aint no shortage of hair down there.

What do you think that rock weighs?

Shit, said Billy.

All we'd have to do is tip it over.

I'll bet that damn rock weighs five tons. How in the hell are you goin to tip it over?

I dont believe it would be all that hard.

And where you goin to tip it to?

We could tip it this way.

Then it'd be layin over the hole.

So what? The pups are at the back.

What makes you so bullheaded? You cant get the horses in here and if you could they'd pull the damn rock over on top of theirselves.

They wouldnt have to be in here. They could be outside.

The ropes wont reach.

They will if we tie em end to end.

They still wont. It'd take near one just to go around the rock. I think I can make it reach.

You got a ropestretcher in your saddlebags? Anyway, no two horses could tip that rock over.

They could with some leverage.

Bullheaded, Billy said. Worst case I believe I ever saw.

There's some fairsized saplin trees at the upper end of the wash. If we could cut one of em with the mattock we could use it for a prypole. Then we could tie the rope to the end of it and that would save havin to tie it around the rock. We'd be killin two birds with one stone.

Two horses and two cowboys is more like it.

We should of brought a axe.

You let me know when you're ready to go back. I'm goin to see if I can catch me a little nap.

All right.

John Grady rode up to the wash with the mattock across the saddle in front of him. Billy stretched out and crossed his boots one over the top of theother and pulled his hat over his face. It was totally silent in the basin. No wind, no bird. No call of cattle. He was almost asleep when he heard the first dull chock of the mattock blade. He smiled into the darkness of his hatcrown and slept.

When John Grady came back he was dragging behind the horse a cottonwood sapling he'd topped out and limbed. It was about eighteen feet long and close to six inches in diameter at the base and the weight of it hanging by the loop of rope from the saddlehorn was pulling his saddle over. He rode half standing in the offside stirrup with his left leg hanging over the sapling trunk and the horse was walking on eggshells. When he reached the rocks he stepped down and unlooped the rope and let the pole down on the ground and walked in and kicked Billy's bootsole.

Wake up and piss, he said. The world's on fire.

Let the son of a bitch burn.

Come on and give me a hand.

Billy shoved the hat back from his face and looked up. All right, he said.

They tied John Grady's catchrope to the end of the pole and stood it up behind the rock and made a cairn of rocks to bridge between the butt of it and the next ledge of rock up the slope. Then John Grady joined the home ends of the two reatas with a running splice and looped a broad Y in the end of Billy's rope that would afford loops for both pommels. They stood the horses side by side and dropped the loops over the horns and looked up at the rope bellying down from the end of the pole and they looked at each other and then they untracted the horses and walked them forward by the cheekstraps. The rope stretched taut. The pole bowed. They talked the horses forward and the horses leaned into their work. Billy looked up at the rope. If that sumbuck breaks, he said, we're goin to be huntin a hole.

The pole sawed suddenly sideways and stopped again and stood quivering.

Shit, said Billy.

I hear you. If that thing comes out of there you'll be huntin more than a hole.

We'll be huntin a undertaker.

What do you want to do?

It's your show, cowboy.

John Grady walked around and checked the pole and came back. Let's head the horses a little bit more to the left, he said.

All right.

They eased the horses forward. The rope stretched and began to unwind slowly on its axis. They looked at the rope and they looked at the horses. They looked at each other. Then the rock moved. It began to rear haltingly up out of its resting place these thousand years and it tilted and tottered and fell forward into the little grotto with a thud they could feel through their bootsoles. The pole clattered among the rocks, the horses recovered and stood.

Kiss my ass, said Billy.

They set to digging in the bare sunless earth that the rock had vacated and in twenty minutes they'd uncovered the den. The pups were back in the farthest corner huddled in a pile. John Grady lay on his stomach and reached down and back and brought one out and held it to the light. It just filled the palm of his hand and it was fat and it swung its small muzzle about and whined and blinked its pale blue eyes.

Hold him.

How many are they?

I dont know.

He ran his arm down the hole again and reached back and brought out another. Billy sat and piled the dogs together in the crook of his knee as they came. There were four of them. I'll bet these little shits are hungry, he said. Is that all of em?

John Grady lay with his cheek in the dirt. I think that's them, he said.

The dogs were trying to hide under Billy's knee. He held one up by its small nape. It hung like a sock, glaring bleakly at the world with its watery eyes.

Listen a minute, said John Grady.

They sat listening.

There's anothern.

He ran his arm down the hole and lay on the ground feeling about in the dark beneath them. He closed his eyes. I got him, he said.

The dog he brought up was dead.

Yonder's your runt, Billy said.

The little dog was curled and stiff, its paws before its face. He put it down and pushed his shoulder deeper into the hole.

Can you find him?

No.

Billy stood. Let me try, he said. My arm's longern yours.

All right.

Billy lay in the dirt and ran his arm down into the hole. Come here you little turd, he said.

Have you got him?

Yeah. Damn if I dont think he's offerin to bite me.

The dog came up mewling and twisting in his hand.

This aint no runt, he said.

Let me see him.

He's fat as a butterball.

John Grady took the little dog and held it in his cupped hand.

Wonder what was he doin off back there by himself?

Maybe he was with the one that died.

John Grady held the dog up and looked into its small wrinkled face. I think I got me a dog, he said.

HE WORKED all through the month of December at the cabin. He carried tools horseback up the Bell Springs trail and he left a mattock and a spade beside the road and worked on the roadway by hand in the evenings when it was cool, filling the washes and cutting brush and ditching and filling in the gullies and squatting and eyeing the terrain for the way the water would run. In three weeks' time he had the worst of the trash hauled or burned and he had painted the stove and patched the roof and driven the truck for the first time up the old road all the way to the cabin with the new lengths of blue sheetmetal stovepipe in the truckbed and the cans of paint and whitewash and new pine shelving for the kitchen.

At the wreckingyard out on Alameda he went up and down the aisles of old stacked windowsash with a steel tape measuring by height and width and checking figures against those he'd jotted on the notepad in his shirtpocket. He dragged the windows he wanted out into the aisle and got the truck and backed it to the door and he and the yardman loaded the windows in the truck. The man sold him some panes of glass to replace the broken ones and showed him how to score and break them with a glasscutter and then gave him the glasscutter.

He bought an old Mennonite kitchen table made of pine and the man helped him carry it out and set it in the bed of the truck and the man told him to take the drawer out and stand it in the bed.

You go around a curve it'll come out of there.

Yessir.

Liable to go plumb overboard.

Yessir.

And take that glass and put it up there in the cab with you if you dont want it broke.

All right.

I'll see you.

Yessir.

He worked long into the nights and he'd come in and unsaddle the horse and brush it in the partial darkness of the barn bay and walk across to the kitchen and get his supper out of the warmer and sit and eat alone at the table by the shaded light of the lamp and listen to the faultless chronicling of the ancient clockworks in the hallway and the ancient silence of the desert in the darkness about. There were times he'd fall asleep in the chair and wake at some strange hour and stagger up and cross the yard to the barn and get the pup and take it and put it in its box on the floor beside his bunk and lie face down with his arm over the side of the bunk and his hand in the box so that it would not cry and then fall asleep in his clothes.

Christmas came and went. In the afternoon of the first Sunday in January Billy rode up and crossed the little creek and halloed the house and stood down. John Grady came to the door.

What are you doin? Billy said.

Paintin windowsash.

Billy nodded. He looked about. You aint goin to ask me in?

John Grady passed his sleeve along the side of his nose. He had a paintbrush in one hand and his hands were blue. I didnt know I had to, he said. Come on in.

Billy came in and stood. He took a cigarette from his pocket and lit it and looked around. He walked into the other room and he came back. The adobe brick walls had been whitewashed and the inside of the little house was bright and monastically austere. The clay floors were swept and slaked and he'd beaten them down with a homemade maul contrived from a fencepost with a section of board nailed to the bottom.

The old place dont look half bad. You aim to get you a Santo to put in the corner yonder?

I might.

Billy nodded.

I'll take all the help I can get, John Grady said.

I hear you, said Billy. He looked at the bright blue of the sash of the windows. Did they not have any blue paint? he said.

They said this was about as close as they could get.

You fixin to paint the door the same color?

Yep.

You got another brush?

Yeah. I got one.

Billy took off his hat and hung it on one of the pegs by the door. Well, he said. Where's it at?

John Grady poured paint from his paintcan into an empty one and Billy squatted on one knee and stirred the brush into the paint. He passed the flat of the brush carefully across the rim of the can and painted a bright blue band down the center stile. He looked across his shoulder.

How come you to have a extra brush?

Just in case some fool showed up wantin to paint, I reckon.

They quit before dark. A cool wind was coming down from the gap in the Jarillas. They stood by the truck and Billy smoked and they watched the running fire deepening to darkness over the mountains to the west.

It's goin to be cold up here in the wintertime, pardner, Billy said.

I know it.

Cold and lonely.

It wont be lonely.

I'm talkin about her.

Mac says she can come down and work with Socorro whenever she wants.

Well that's good. I dont expect there'll be a lot of empty chairs at the table on them days.

John Grady smiled. I expect you're right.

When have you seen her?

Not for a while.

How long a while?

I dont know. Three weeks.

Billy shook his head.

She's still there, John Grady said.

You got a lot of confidence in her.

Yes I do.

What do you think is goin to happen when her and Socorro get their heads together?

She dont tell everthing she knows.

Her or Socorro?

Either one.

I hope you're right.

They aint goin to run her off, Billy. There's more to her than just she's good lookin.

Billy flipped the cigarette out across the yard. We better get on back.

You can take the truck if you want.

That's all right. Go on. I'll ride that old crowbait of yours. Billy nodded. Ride him blind through the brush tryin to beat me back. Get him snakebit and I dont know what all. Go on. I'll ride behind the truck. Horse like that it takes a special hand to ride him in the dark. I'll bet it does. A rider that can instill confidence in a animal. John Grady smiled and shook his head. A rider that's accustomed to the ways and the needs of the nighthorse. Ride the bedgrounds slow. Ride left to right. Sing to them snuffles. Dont pop no matches. I hear you. Did your grandaddy used to talk about goin up the trail? Some. Yeah. You think you'll ever go back to that country? I doubt it. You will. One of these days. Or I say you will. If you live. You want to take the truck back? Naw. Go on. I'll be along. All right. Dont eat my dessert. All right. I appreciate you Comin up. I didnt have nothin else to do. Well. If I had I'd of done it. I'll see you at the house. See you at the house.

JOSEFINA WAS STANDING in the door watching. In the room the criada turned, one hand lofting the weight of the girl's dark hair for her to see. Bueno, said Josefina. Muy bonita. The criada smiled thinly, her mouth bristling with hairpins. Josefina looked back down the hall and then leaned in the door.

fl viene, she whispered. Then she turned and padded away down the corridor. The criada turned the girl quickly and studied her and touched her hair and stood back. She passed her thumb across her lips gathering the pins. Eres la china poblana perfecta, she said. Perfecta.

Es bella la china poblana? the girl said.

The criada arched her brows in surprise. The wrinkled lid fluttered over the pale blind eye. S', she said. S'. Por supuesto. Todo el mundo to sabe.

Eduardo stood in the doorway. The criada saw the girl's eyes and turned. He jerked his chin at her and she went to the dresser and laid down the hairbrush and put the pins in a china tray and went past him and out the door.

He came in and shut the door behind him. The girl stood quietly in the center of the room.

VoltZate, he said. He made a stirring motion with his forefinger.

She turned.

Ven aqu'.

She came slowly forward and stood. He took her jaw in the palm of his hand and raised her face and looked into her painted eyes. When she lowered it again he put his hand into the gathered hair at her neck and pulled her head back. She turned her eyes up toward the ceiling. Her pale throat exposed. The visible bloodpulse in the thick arteries at either side of her neck and the small tic at the corner of her mouth. He told her to look at him and she did but she seemed to have power to cause those dark and hooded eyes of hers to go opaque. So that the visible depth in them was lost or shrouded. So that they hid the world within. He recaught his grip in her hair and the smooth skin tautened over her cheekbones and her eyes widened. He commanded again that she look at him but she was already looking at him and she did not answer.

A quiZn le rezas? he hissed.

A Dios.

QuiZn responde?

Nadie.

Nadie, he said.

That night she felt the cold pneuma come upon her as she lay naked in the bed. She turned and called to the cliente standing in the room.

I'm bein as quick as I can, he said.

By the time he'd slid into the bed beside her she'd cried out and gone rigid and her eyes white. In the muted light he could not see her but he placed his hand on her body and felt her bowed and trembling under his palm and taut as a snaredrum. He felt the tremor of her like the hum of a current running in her bones.

What is it? he said. What is it?

He came out into the hallway half dressed and pulling on his clothes. Tiburcio appeared from nowhere. He pushed the man aside and knelt in the girl's bed and unbuckled his belt and whipped it from about his waist and caught it and folded it and seized the girl's jaw and forced the leather between her teeth. The cliente watched from the doorway. I didnt do nothin, he said. I never even touched her.

Tiburcio rose and strode toward the door.

She just went that way, the cliente said.

Speak to no one, Tiburcio said. You understand me?

You got it, old buddy. Just you let me get my shoes.

The alcahuete shut the door after him. The girl was breathing harshly through the belt. He sat and pulled back the covers. He studied her without expression. He bent over her slightly in his black silk. The soft false whisper of it. A morbid voyeur, a mortician. An incubus of uncertain proclivity or perhaps just a dark dandy happened in from off the neon streets who aped imperfectly with his pale and tapered hands those ministrations of the healing arts that he had seen or heard of or as he imagined them to be. What are you? he said. You are nothing.

WHEN H E STEPPED OUT onto the porch and let the screendoor to behind him Mr Johnson was sitting on the edge of the porch with his elbows propped on his knees watching the sunset where it deepened and flared over the Franklins to the west. Distant flocks of geese were moving downriver along the jornada. They looked no more than bits of string against the raucous red of the sky and they were far too distant to be heard.

Where are you off to? said the old man.

John Grady walked to the edge of the porch and stood picking his teeth and looking out across the country along with him. What makes you think I'm off to somewhere?

Hair all slicked back like a muskrat. Boots.

He sat on the boards beside the old man. Goin to town, he said.

The old man nodded. Well, he said. I reckon it's still there.

Yessir.

You couldnt prove it by me.

When was the last time you were in El Paso?

I dont know. Been a year, I'd say. Maybe longer.

You dont get tired bein out here all the time?

I do. At times.

You dont ever want to make a run in to sort of see what's goin on?

I dont believe it would help. I dont believe there's anything goin on.

Did you used to go over to Ju++rez?

Yes I did. Back when I was a drinkin man. The last time I was in Ju++rez Mexico was in nineteen and twentynine. I seen a man shot in a bar. He was standin at the bar drinkin a beer and this man come in and walked up behind him and pulled a government fortyfive out of his belt and shot him in the back of the head with it. Stuck the gun back in his breeches and turned and walked out again. He wasnt even in a hurry about it.

Shot him dead?

Yes. He was dead standin there. Thing I remember is how quick he fell down. Just dead weight. The movies dont ever get that part right neither.

Where were you?

I was standin almost next to him. I seen it in the bar mirror. I'm partially deaf to this day in this one ear on account of it. His head just damn near come off. Blood everwhere. Brains. I had on a brand new Stradivarius gabardine shirt and a pretty good Stetson hat and I burned everthing I had on save the boots. I bet I took nine baths handrunnin.

He looked out across the country to the west where the sky was darkening. Tales of the old west, he said.

Yessir.

Lot of people shot and killed.

Why were they?

Mr Johnson passed the tips of his fingers across his jaw. Well, he said. I think these people mostly come from Tennessee and Kentucky. Edgefield district in South Carolina. Southern Missouri. They were mountain people. They come from mountain people in the old country. They always would shoot you. It wasnt just here. They kept comin west and about the time they got here was about the time Sam Colt invented the sixshooter and it was the first time these people could afford a gun you could carry around in your belt. That's all there ever was to it. It had nothin to do with the country at all. The west. They'd of been the same it dont matter where they might of wound up. I've thought about it and that's the only conclusion I could ever come to.

How bad of a drinkin man did you used to be, Mr Johnson? If you dont care for me to ask.

Pretty bad. Maybe not as bad as some might like to remember it. But it was more than a passin acquaintance.

Yessir.

You can ask whatever you want.

Yessir.

You get my age you kindly get weaned off standin on ceremony. I think it embarrasses Mac at times. But dont worry about askin me stuff.

Yessir. Was that when you quit drinkin?

No. I was more dedicated than that. I quit and took it up again. Quit and took it up. Finally got around to quittin all together. Maybe I just got too old for it. There wasnt any virtue in it.

The drinkin or the quittin?

Either one. There aint no virtue in quittin what you aint able any longer to do in the first place. That's pretty, aint it.

He nodded toward the sunset. Deep laminar red. The cool of the coming dark was in it and it was all around them.

Yessir, said John Grady. It is.

The old man took his cigarettes from his shirtpocket. John Grady smiled. I see you aint quit smokin, he said.

I intend to be buried with a pack in my pocket.

You think you'll need em on the other side?

Not really. A man can hope though.

He watched the sky. Where do bats go in the wintertime? They got to eat.

I think maybe they migrate.

I hope so.

Do you think I ought to get married?

Hell, son. How would I know?

You never did.

That dont mean I didnt try.

What happened?

She wouldnt have me.

Why not?

I was too broke for her. Or maybe for her daddy. I dont know.

What happened to her?

It was a peculiar thing. She went on and married another old boy and she died in childbirth. It was not uncommon in them days. She was a awful pretty girl. Woman. I dont think she'd turned twenty. I think about her yet.

The last of the colors died in the west. The sky was dark and blue. Then just dark. The kitchen windowlights lay across the porch boards beside them where they sat.

I miss knowin whatever become of certain people. Where they're livin at and how they're gettin on or where they died at if they did die. I think about old Bill Reed. Sometimes I'll say to myself, I'll say: I wonder whatever happened to old Bill Reed? I dont reckon I'll ever know. Me and him was good friends, too.

What else?

What else what?

What else do you miss?

The old man shook his head. You dont want to get me started.

A lot?

Not all of it. I dont miss pullin a tooth with a pair of shoein tongs and nothin but cold wellwater to numb it. But I miss the old range life. I went up the trail four times. Best times of my life. The best. Bein out. Seem new country. There's nothin like it in the world. There never will be. Settin around the fire of the evenin with the herd bedded down good and no wind. Get you some coffee. Listen to the old waddies tell their stories. Good stories, too. Roll you a smoke. Sleep. There's no sleep like it. None.

He flipped the cigarette out into the dark. Socorro opened the door and looked out. Mr Johnson, she said, you ought to come in. It is too cold for you.

I'll be in directly.

I better go on I guess, John Grady said.

Dont keep one waitin, the old man said. They wont tolerate it.

Yessir.

Go on then.

He rose. Socorro had gone back in. He looked down at the old man. Still you dont think it's all that good a idea, do you?

What dont I think?

About gettin married.

I never said that.

Do you think it?

I think you ought to follow your heart, the old man said. That's all I ever thought about anything.

Going up Ju++rez Avenue among the crowds of tourists he saw the shineboy at his corner and waved a hand to him.

I guess you're on your way to see your girl, the boy said.

No. I'm goin to see a friend of mine.

Is she still your novia?

Yes she is.

When you gettin married?

Pretty soon.

Did you ask her?

Yes.

She said yes?

She did.

The boy grinned. Otro m++s de los perdidos, he said.

Otro m++s.

cndale pues, the boy said. I cant help you now.

He entered the Moderno and took off his hat and hung it among the hats and instruments along the long wallrack by the door and he took a table next to the one reserved for the maestro. The barman nodded to him across the room and raised one hand. Buenas tardes, he called.

Buenas tardes, said John Grady. He folded his hands before him on the tabletop. Two of the ancient musicians in their dull black stage suits were sitting at a table in the corner and they nodded to him politely who was a friend to the maestro and he nodded back and the waiter came across the concrete floor in his white apron and greeted him. He ordered a tequila and the waiter bowed. As if the decision were a grave one well taken. From outside in the street came the cries of children, the calls of vendors. A square shaft of light fell slant from the barred streetwindow above him and terminated out on the floor in a pale trapezoid. In the center of it like a thing displayed in a bent and veering cage sat a large lemoncolored housecat washing itself. It shook its head and yawned. It turned and looked at him. The waiter brought the tequila.

He wet the top of his fist with his tongue and poured on salt from a tableshaker and he sipped the tequila and took a wedge of sliced lemon from the dish and crushed it between his teeth and laid it back in the dish and licked the salt from his fist. Then he took another sip of the tequila. The musicians watched him, sitting quietly.

He drank the tequila and ordered another. The cat was gone. The cage of light moved across the floor. After a while it started up the wall. The waiter had turned on the lights in the other room and a third musician had come in and joined the first two. Then the maestro entered with his daughter.

The waiter came over and helped him with his coat and held the chair. They spoke briefly and the waiter nodded and smiled at the girl and carried away the maestro's coat and hung it up. The girl turned slightly in her chair and looked at John Grady.

C-mo est++s? she said.

Bien. Y toe?

Bien, gracias.

The blind man had tilted archly in his chair listening. Good evening, he said. Will you join us please?

Thank you. Yes. I would like to.

Then you must.

He pushed back his chair and rose. The maestro smiled at his approach and held out his hand into the darkness.

How are you?

Fine, thank you.

The blind man spoke to the girl in Spanish. He shook his head. Mar'a is shy, he said. Por quZ no hablas inglZs con nuestro amigo? You see. She will not. It is of no use. Where is the waiter? What will you have please?

The waiter brought the drinks and the maestro ordered for his guest. He put his hand on the girl's arm for her to wait till all were served. When the waiter had gone he turned. Now, he said. What has happened?

I asked her to marry me.

She has refused? Tell me.

No. She accepted.

But so solemn. You gave us a scare.

The girl rolled up her eyes and looked away. John Grady had no idea what it meant.

I came to ask you a favor.

Of course, said the maestro. By all means.

She has no family. No sponsor. I would like for you to be her padrino.

Ah, said the maestro. He put his folded hands to his chin and then placed them on the table again. They waited.

I am honored of course. But this is a serious matter. You understand.

Yes. I understand.

You will be living in America.

Yes.

America, the maestro said. Yes.

They sat. The blind man in his silence was twice silent. Even the three musicians in the corner were watching him. They could not hear what he was saying but they seemed to be waiting also for him to continue.

The office of the padrino is not a mere ceremony, he said. It is not some gesture of kinship or some way to bind friends.

Yes. I understand.

It is a serious matter and it is no insult that a man should refuse to accept it if his reasons are honorable.

Yessir.

One needs to be logical in these matters.

The maestro raised one hand before him and spread his fingers and he held it there. Like an evocation perhaps, or a gesture of fending away. Had he not been blind he would simply have been studying his nails. My health is poor, he said. But

even were that not so this girl will be making a new life and she should have counsel in her new country. Dont you think this would be best?

I dont know. I feel like she needs all the help she can get.

Yes. Of course.

Is it because of your sight?

The blind man lowered his hand. No, he said. It is not a matter of sight.

He waited for the blind man to continue but he did not.

Is there something you cant say in front of the girl?

The girl? said the maestro. He smiled his blind smile, he shook his head. Oh my, he said. No no. We have no secrets. An old blind father with secrets? No, that would never do.

We dont have padrinos in America, John Grady said.

The waiter came and set John Grady's drink in front of him and the maestro thanked the waiter and slid his fingers across the wood of the table until they touched his own glass.

I drink to the boda, he said.

Gracias.

They drank. The girl bent down the straw in her bottle of refresco and leaned and sipped.

If a person could be found, said the maestro, of intelligence and heart, then perhaps the office could be explained to him. What do you think?

I think you are that person.

The blind man sipped his wine and set the glass back in the very ring upon the table it had vacated and folded his hands in thought.

Let me say this to you, he said.

Yessir.

In a matter such as this, once one is asked he is already responsible. Even should he refuse.

I'm just thinking about her.

I too.

She doesnt have anyone else. She has no friends.

But the padrino does not need to be a friend.

He has to be something.

He has to be a man of character who is willing to undertake certain duties. That is all. He could be a friend or not. He could be a rival from another house. He could be one to reunite families distanced by intrigue or bad blood or politics. You understand. He could be one with little connection to the family even. He could even be an enemy.

An enemy?

Yes. I know of such a case. In this very city.

Why would a man want an enemy for a padrino?

For the best of reasons. Or the worst. This man of whom we speak was a dying man when his lastborn came into the world. A son. His only son. So what did he do? He called upon that man who once had been a friend to him but now was his sworn enemy and he asked that man to be padrino to his son. The man refused of course. What? Are you mad? He must have been surprised. It had been years since last they spoke and their enemistad was a deep and bitter thing. Perhaps they had become enemies for the same reason they had once been friends. Which often happens in the world. But this man persisted. And he had thehow do you sayel naipe? En su manga.

The ace.

Yes. The ace up his sleeve. He told his enemy that he was dying. There was the naipe. Upon the table. The man could not refuse. All choosing was taken from his hands.

The blind man raised one hand into the smoky air in a thin upward slicing motion. Now comes the talk, he said. No end to it. Some say that the dying man wished to mend their friendship. Others that he had done this man some great injustice and wished to make amends before leaving this world forever. Others said other things. There is more than meets the eye. I say this: This man who was dying was not a man given to sentimentality. He also had lost friends to death. He was not a man given to illusions. He knew that those things we most desire to hold in our hearts are often taken from us while that which we would put away seems often by that very wish to become endowed with unsuspected powers of endurance. He knew how frail is the memory of loved ones. How we close our eyes and speak to them. How we long to hear their voices once again, and how those voices and those memories grow faint and faint until what was flesh and blood is no more than echo and shadow. In the end perhaps not even that.

He knew that our enemies by contrast seem always with us. The greater our hatred the more persistent the memory of them so that a truly terrible enemy becomes deathless. So that the man who has done you great injury or injustice makes himself a guest in your house forever. Perhaps only forgiveness can dislodge him.

Such then was this man's thinking. If we may believe the best of him. To bind the padrino to his cause with the strongest bonds he knew. And there was more. For in this appointment he also posted the world as his sentinel. The duties of a friend would come under no great scrutiny. But an enemy? You can see how nicely he has caught him in the net he has contrived. For this enemy was in fact a man of conscience. A worthy enemy. And this enemypadrino now must carry the dying man in his heart forever. Must suffer the eyes of the world eternally on him. Such a man can scarce be said to author any longer his own path.

The father dies as die he must. The enemy become padrino now becomes the father of the child. The world is watching. It stands in for the dead man. Who by his audacity has pressed it into his service. For the world does have a conscience, however men dispute it. And while that conscience may be thought of as the sum of consciences of men there is another view, which is that it may stand alone and each man's share be but some small imperfect part of it. The man who died favored this view. As I do myself. Men may believe the world to bewhat is the word? Voluble.

Fickle.

Fickle? I dont know. Voluble then. But the world is not voluble. The world is always the same. The man appointed the world as his witness that he might secure his enemy to his service. That this enemy would be faithful to his duties. That is what he did. Or that was my belief. At times I believe it yet.

How did it turn out?

Quite strangely.

The blind man reached for his glass. He drank and held the glass before him as if studying it and then he set it on the table before him once again.

Quite strangely. For the circumstance of his appointment came to elevate this man's padrinazgo to the central role of his life. It brought out what was best in him. More than best. Virtues long neglected began almost at once to blossom forth. He abandoned every vice. He even began to attend Mass. His new office seemed to have called forth from the deepest parts of his character honor and loyalty and courage and devotion. What he gained can scarcely be put into words. Who would have foreseen such a thing?

What happened? said John Grady.

The blind man smiled his pained blind smile. You smell the rat, he said.

Yes.

Quite so. It was no happy ending. Perhaps there is a moral to the tale. Perhaps not. I leave it to you.

What happened?

This man whose life was changed forever by the dying request of his enemy was ultimately ruined. The child became his life. More than his life. To say that he doted upon the child says nothing. And yet all turned out badly. Again, I believe that the intentions of the dying man were for the best. But there is another view. It would not be the first time that a father sacrificed a son.

The godchild grew up wild and restless. He became a criminal. A petty thief. A gambler. And other things. Finally, in the winter of nineteen and seven, in the town of Ojinaga, he killed a man. He was nineteen years of age. Close to your own, perhaps.

The same.

Yes. Perhaps this was his destiny. Perhaps no padrino could have saved him from himself. No father. The padrino squandered all he owned in bribes and fees. To no avail. Such a road once undertaken has no end and he died alone and poor. He was never bitter. He scarcely seemed even to consider whether he had been betrayed. He once had been a strong and even a ruthless man, but love makes men foolish. I speak as a victim myself. We are taken out of our own care and it then remains to be seen only if fate will show to us some share of mercy. Or little. Or none.

Men speak of blind destiny, a thing without scheme or purpose. But what sort of destiny is that? Each act in this world from which there can be no turning back has before it another, and it another yet. In a vast and endless net. Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in that maze is itself an enslavement for it voids every alternative and binds one ever more tightly into the constraints that make a life. If the dead man could have forgiven his enemy for whatever wrong was done to him all would have been otherwise. Did the son set out to avenge his father? Did the dead man sacrifice his son? Our plans are predicated upon a future unknown to us. The world takes its form hourly by a weighing of things at hand, and while we may seek to puzzle out that form we have no way to do so. We have only God's law, and the wisdom to follow it if we will.

The maestro leaned forward and composed his hands before him. The wineglass stood empty and he took it up. Those who cannot see, he said, must rely upon what has gone before. If I do not wish to appear so foolish as to drink from an empty glass I must remember whether I have drained it or not. This man who became padrino. I speak of him as if he died old but he did not. He was younger than I am now. I speak as if his conscience or the world's eyes or both led him to such rigor in his duties. But those considerations quickly fell to nothing. It was for love of the child that he came to grief, if grief it was. What do you make of that?

I dont know.

Nor I. I only know that every act which has no heart will be found out in the end. Every gesture.

They sat in silence. The room was quiet about them. John Grady watched the water beading upon his glass where it sat untouched before him. The blind man set his own glass back upon the table and pushed it from him.

How well do you love this girl?

I would die for her.

The alcahuete is in love with her.

Tiburcio?

No. The grand alcahuete.

Eduardo.

Yes.

They sat quietly. In the outer hall the musicians had arrived and were assembling their instruments. John Grady sat staring at the floor. After a while he looked up.

Can the old woman be trusted?

La Tuerta?

Yes.

Oh my, said the blind man softly.

The old woman tells her that she will be married.

The old woman is Tiburcio's mother.

John Grady leaned back in his chair. He sat very quietly. He looked at the blind man's daughter. She watched him. Quiet. Kind. Inscrutable.

You did not know.

No. Does she know? Yes, of course she knows.

Yes.

Does she know that Eduardo is in love with her?

Yes.

The musicians struck up a light baroque partita. Aging dancers moved onto the floor. The blind man sat, his hands before him on the table.

She believes that Eduardo will kill her, John Grady said.

The blind man nodded.

Do you believe he will kill her?

Yes, said the maestro. I believe he will kill her.

Is that why you wont be her godfather? Yes.

That is why.

It would make you responsible.

Yes.

The dancers moved with their stiff formality over the swept and polished concrete floor. They danced with an antique grace, like figures from a film.

What do you think I should do?

I cannot advise you.

You will not.

No. I will not.

I'd give her up if I thought I could not protect her.

Perhaps.

You dont think I could.

I think the difficulties might be greater than you imagine.

What should I do.

The blind man sat. After a while he said: You must understand. I have no certainty. And it is a grave matter.

He passed his hand across the top of the table. As if he were making smooth something unseen before him. You wish for me to tell you some secret of the grand alcahuete. Betray to you some weakness. But the girl herself is the weakness.

What do you think I should do?

Pray to God.

Yes.

Will you?

No.

Why not?

I dont know.

You dont believe in Him?

It's not that.

It is that the girl is a mujerzuela.

I dont know. Maybe.

The blind man sat. They are dancing, he said.

Yes.

That is not the reason.

What's not?

That she is a whore.

No.

Would you give her up? Truly?

I dont know.

Then you would not know what to pray for.

No. I wouldnt know what to ask.

The blind man nodded. He leaned forward. He placed one elbow on the table and rested his forehead against his thumb like a confessor. He seemed to be listening to the music. You knew her before she came to the White Lake, he said.

I saw her. Yes.

At La Venada.

Yes.

As did he.

Yes. I suppose.

That is where it began.

Yes. He is a cuchillero. A filero, as they say here. A man of a certain rigor. A serious man.

I am serious myself.

Of course. If you were not there would be no problem.

John Grady studied that passive face. Closed to the world even as the world was closed to him.

What are you telling me?

I have nothing to tell.

He is in love with her.

Yes.

But he would kill her.

Yes.

I see.

Perhaps. Let me tell you only this. Your love has no friends. You think that it does but it does not. None. Perhaps not even God.

And you?

I do not count myself. If I could see what lies ahead I would tell you. But I cannot.

You think I'm a fool.

No. I do not.

You would not say so if you did.

No, but I would not lie. I dont think it. I never did. A man is always right to pursue the thing he loves.

No matter even if it kills him?

I think so. Yes. No matter even that.

HE WHEELED the last barrowload of trash from the kitchen yard out to the trashfire and tipped it and stood back and watched the deep orange fire gasping in the dark chuffs of smoke that rose against the twilight sky. He passed his forearm across his brow and bent and took up the handles of the wheelbarrow again and trundled it out to where the pickup was parked and loaded it and raised and latched the tailgate and went back into the house. HZctor was backing across the floor sweeping with the broom. They carried the kitchen table in from the other room and then brought in the chairs. HZctor brought the lamp from the sideboard and set it on the table and lifted away the glass chimney and lit the wick. He blew out the match and set back the chimney and adjusted the flame with the brass knob. Where is the Santo? he said.

It's still in the truck. I'll get it.

He went out and brought in the rest of the things from the cab of the truck. He set the crude wooden figure of the saint on the dresser and unwrapped the sheets and set about making the bed. HZctor stood in the doorway.

You want me to help you?

No. Thanks.

He leaned against the doorjamb smoking. John Grady smoothed the sheets and unfolded the pillowcases and stuffed the feather pillows into them and then unfolded the pieced quilt that Socorro had given him. HZctor stuck the cigarette in his mouth and came around to the other side of the bed and they spread the quilt and stood back.

I think we're done, John Grady said.

They went back into the kitchen and John Grady leaned and cupped his hand at the top of the lamp chimney and blew out the flame and they went out and shut the door behind them. They walked out in the yard and John Grady turned and looked back toward the cabin. The night was overcast. Dark, cloudy, cold. They walked down to the truck.

Will they wait supper on you?

Yeah, said HZctor. Sure.

You can eat at the house if you want.

That's all right.

They climbed in and pulled the truck doors shut. John Grady started the engine.

Can she ride a horse? said HZctor.

Yeah. She can ride.

They pulled out down the rutted road, the tools sliding and clanking behind them in the truckbed. En quZ piensas? said John Grady.

Nada.

They jostled on, the truck in second gear, the headlights rocking. When they rounded the first turn in the road the lights of the city appeared out on the plain below them thirty miles away.

It gets cold up here, HZctor said.

Yep.

You spent the night up here yet?

I was up here a couple of nights till past midnight.

He looked at HZctor. HZctor took his makings from his shirtpocket and sat rolling a cigarette.

Tienes tus dudas.

He shrugged. He popped a match with the nail of his thumb and lit the cigarette and blew the match out. Hombre de precauci-n, he said.

Yo?

Yo.

Two owls crouching in the dust of the road turned their pale and heartshaped faces in the trucklights and blinked and rose on their white wings as silent as two souls ascending and vanished in the darkness overhead.

Buhos, said John Grady.

Lechuzas.

Tecolotes.

HZctor smiled. He took a drag on the cigarette. His dark face glowed in the dark glass. Quiz++s, he said.

Pueda ser.

Pueda ser. S'.

WHEN HE WALKED into the kitchen Oren was still at the table. He hung up his hat and went to the sink and washed and got his coffee. Socorro came out of her room and shooed him away from the stove and he took his coffee to the table and sat. Oren looked up from his paper.

What's the news, Oren?

You want the good or the bad?

I dont know. Just pick out somethin in the middle.

They dont have nothin like that in here. It wouldnt be news. I guess not.

McGregor girl's been picked to be the Sun Carnival Queen. You ever see her?

No.

Sweet girl. How's your place comin?

Okay.

Socorro set his plate before him together with a plate of biscuits covered with a cloth.

She aint no city gal is she?

No.

That's good.

Yeah. It is.

Parham tells me she's pretty as a speckled pup.

He thinks I'm crazy.

Well. You might be a little crazy. He might be a little jealous. He watched the boy eat. He sipped his coffee.

When I got married my buddies all told me I was crazy. Said I'd regret it.

Did you?

No. It didnt work out. But I didnt regret it. It wasnt her fault. What happened?

I dont know. A lot of things. Mostly I couldnt get along with her folks. The mother was just a goddamned awful woman. I thought I'd seen awful but I hadnt. If the old man would of lived we might of had a chance. But he had a bad heart. I seen the whole thing comin. When I inquired after his health it was more than just idle curiosity. He finally up and died and here she come. Bag and baggage. That was pretty much the end of it.

He took his cigarettes from the table and lit one. He blew smoke thoughtfully out across the room. He watched the boy.

We was together three years almost to the day. She used to bathe me, if you can believe that. I liked her real well. She'd of been a orphan we'd be married yet.

I'm sorry to hear it.

A man gets married he dont know what's liable to happen. He may think he does, but he dont.

Probably right.

If you sincerely want to hear all about what is wrong with you and what you ought to do to rectify it all you need to do is let them inlaws on the place. You'll get a complete rundown on the subject and I guarantee it.

She aint got no family.

That's good, said Oren. That's your smartest move yet.

After Oren had gone he sat over his coffee a long time. Through the window far to the south he could see the thin white adderstongues of lightning licking silently along the rim of the sky in the darkness over Mexico. The only sound was the clock ticking in the hallway.

When he entered the barn Billy's light was still on. He went down to the stall where he kept the pup and gathered it up all twisting and whimpering in the crook of his arm and brought it back to his bunkroom. He stood at the door and looked back.

Goodnight, he called.

He pushed aside the curtain and felt overhead in the dark for the lightswitch chain.

Goodnight, called Billy.

He smiled. He let go the chain and sat on his bunk in the darkness rubbing the pup's belly. He could smell the horses. The wind was gusting up and a piece of loose roofingtin at the far end of the barn rattled and the wind passed on. It was cold in the room and he thought to light the little kerosene heater but after a while he just pulled off his boots and trousers and put the pup inhis box and crawled under the blankets. The wind outside and the cold in the room were like those winter nights on the north Texas plains when he was a child in his grandfather's house. When the storms blew down from the north and the prairie land about the house stood white in the sudden lightning and the house shook in the thunderclaps. On just such nights and just such mornings in the year he'd gotten his first colt he'd wrap himself in his blanket and go out and cross to the barn, leaning into the wind, the first drops of rain slapping at him hard as pebbles, moving down the long barn bay like some shrouded refugee among the sudden slats of light that stood staccato out of the parted board walls, moving through those serried and electric prosceniums where they flared white and fugitive across the barn row on row until he reached the stall where the little horse stood waiting and unlatched the door and sat in the straw with his arms around its neck till it stopped trembling. He would be there all night and he would be there in the morning when Arturo came to the barn to feed. Arturo would walk with him back to the house before anyone else was awake, brushing the straw from his blanket as he walked beside him, not saying a word. As if he were a young lord. As if he were never to be disinherited by war and war's machinery. All his early dreams were the same. Something was afraid and he had come to comfort it. He dreamed it yet. And this: standing in the room in the black suit tying the new black tie he wore to his grandfather's funeral on the cold and windy day of it. And standing in his cubicle in Mac McGovern's horsebarn on another such day in the cold dawn before work in another such suit, the two halves of the box it came in lying on the bunk with the crepe tissue spilling out and the cut string lying beside it on the bunk together with the knife he'd cut it with that had belonged to his father and Billy standing in the doorway watching him. He buttoned the coat and stood. His hands crossed at the wrist in front of him. His face pale in the glass of the little mirror he'd propped on one of the two by fours that braced the rough stud wall of the room. Pale in the light of the winter that was on the country. Billy leaned and spat in the chaff and turned and went out down the barn bay and crossed to the house for breakfast.

THE LAST TIME he was to see her was in the same corner room on the second floor of the Dos Mundos. He watched from the window and saw her pay the driver and he went to the door so that he could watch her come up the stairs. He held her hands while she sat half breathless on the edge of the bed.

Est++s bien? he said.

S', she said. Creo que s'.

He asked was she sure she had not changed her mind.

No, she said. Y toe?

Nunca.

Me quieres?

Para siempre. Y toe?

Hasta elfin de mi vida.

Pues eso es todo.

She said that she had tried to pray for them but that she could not.

PorquZ no?

No sZ. Cre' que Dios no me oir'a.

El oir++. Reza el domingo. Dile que es importante.

They made love and lay with her curled against him and not moving but breathing very quietly against his side. He did not know if she was awake but he told her the things about his life that he had not told her. He told her about working for the hacendado at Cuatro CiZnegas and about the man's daughter and the last time he saw her and about being in the prison in Saltillo and about the scar on his face that he had promised to tell her about and never had. He told her about seeing his mother on stage at the Majestic Theatre in San Antonio Texas and about the times that he and his father used to ride in the hills north of San Angelo and about his grandfather and the ranch and the Comanche trail that ran through the western sections and how he would ride that trail in the moonlight in the fall of the year when he was a boy and the ghosts of the Comanches would pass all about him on their way to the other world again and again for a thing once set in motion has no ending in this world until the last witness has passed.

The shadows were long in the room before they left. He told her that the driver GutiZrrez would pick her up at the cafe in la Calle de Noche Triste and take her to the other side. He would have with him the documents necessary for her to cross.

Todo est++ arreglado, he said.

She held his hands more tightly. Her dark eyes studied him. He told her that there was nothing to fear. He said that Ram-n was their friend and that the papers were arranged and that no harm would come to her.

fl to recoger++ a las siete por la ma-ana. Tienes que estar all' en punto.

EstarZ all'.

QuZdate adentro hasta que Zl llegue.

S', s'.

No le digas nada a nadie.

No. Nadie.

No puedes traer nada contigo.

Nada?

Nada.

Tengo miedo, she said.

He held her. Dont be afraid, he said.

They sat very quietly. Down in the street the vendors had begun to call. She pressed her face against his shoulder.

Hablan los sacerdotes espa-ol? she said.

S'. Ellos hablan espa-ol.

Quiero saber, she said, si crees hay perd-n de pecados.

He opened his mouth to speak but she put her hand to his lips. Lo que crees en to coraz-n, she said.

He stared past her dark and shining hair toward the deepening dusk in the streets of the city. He thought about what he believed and what he did not believe. After a while he said that he believed in God even if he was doubtful of men's claims to know God's mind. But that a God unable to forgive was no God at all.

Cualquier pecado?

Cualquier. S'.

Sin excepci-n de nada? She pushed her hand against his lips a second time. He kissed her fingers and took her hand away.

Con la excepci-n de desesperaci-n, he said. Para eso no hay remedio.

Lastly she asked if he would love her all his life and she'd have touched her fingers to his mouth but he held her hand. No tengo que pensarlo, he said. S'. Para todo mi vida.

She took his face in her hands and kissed him. Te amo, she said. Y serZ to esposa.

She rose and turned and held his hands. Debo irme, she said. He stood and put his arms around her and kissed her there in the darkening room. He would have walked her down the hallway to the head of the stairs but she stopped him at the door and kissed him and said goodbye. He listened to her steps in the stairwell. He went to the window to watch for her but she must have gone along the street beneath him because he could not see her. He sat on the bed in the empty room and listened to the sounds of all that alien commerce in the world outside. He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his own doing. The room was dark and the neon hotel sign had come on outside and after a while he rose and took his hat from the chair by the bed and put it on and went out and down the stairs.

AT THE INTERSECTION the cab stopped. A small man with a black crape armband stepped into the street and raised his hand and the cabdriver took off his hat and set it on the dashboard. The girl leaned forward to see. She could hear trumpets muted in the street, the clop of hooves.

The musicians who appeared were old men in suits of dusty black. Behind them came the pallbearers carrying upon their shoulders a flowerstrewn pallet. Wreathed among those flowers the pale face of a young man newly dead. His hands lay at his sides and he jostled woodenly on his coolingboard there astride the shoulders of his bearers and the wild notes from the dented gypsy horns carried back from the glass of the storefronts they passed and back from the old mud or stuccoed facades and a clutch of women in black rebozos passed weeping and children and men in black or with black armbands and among them led by the girl the blind maestro shuffling with his small steps and look of pained wonder. Behind them came two mismatched horses drawing to a weathered wooden cart and in the bed of it unswept of its straw and chaff a wooden coffinbox of handplaned boards pinned with wooden trunnels and no nails to it like some sephardic box of old and the wood blacked by scorching it and the blacking sealed with beeswax and lampoil so that save for the faint wood grain of it it looked a thing of burnished iron. Behind the cart came a man bearing the coffinlid and he carried it upon his back like death's penitent and his clothes and he were blackened with it wax or no. The cabdriver crossed himself silently. The girl crossed herself and kissed the tips of her fingers. The cart rattled past and the spoked wheels diced slowly the farther streetside and the solemn watchers there, a cardfan of sorted faces under the shopfronts and the long skeins of light in the street broken in the turning spokes and the shadows of the horses tramping upright and oblique before the oblong shadows of the wheels shaping over the stones and turning and turning.

She put up her hands and pressed her face into the musty back of the cabseat. She sat back, one hand over her eyes and her face averted into her shoulder. Then she sat bolt upright with her arms beside her and cried out and the driver wrenched himself around in the seat. Se-orita? he said. Se-orita?

THE CEILING of the room was of concrete and bore the impression of the boards used to form it, the concrete knots and nailheads and the fossil arc of the circlesaw's blade from some mountain sawmill. There was a single sooty bulb that burned there with a grudging orange light and a millermoth that patrolled it in random clockwise orbits.

She lay strapped to a steel table. The steel was cold against her back through the short white shift she wore. She looked at the light. She turned her head and looked at the room. After a while a nurse came in through the gray metal door and she turned her stained and dirty face toward her. Por favor, she whispered. Por favor.

The nurse loosed the straps and smoothed her hair back from her face and said she would return with something for her to drink, but when the door closed she sat upright on the table and climbed down. She looked for some place where they might have put her clothes but save for a second steel table against the far wall the room was empty. The door when she opened it led to a long green corridor dimly lit and stretching away to a closed door at the end. She went down the corridor and tried the door. It opened onto a flight of concrete steps, a rail of metal pipe. She descended three flights and exited into the darkened street.

She did not know where she was. At the corner she asked a man for directions to el centro and he stared at her breasts and continued to do so even as he spoke. She set out along the broken sidewalk. She watched the paving for glass or stones. The carlights that passed fetched her slight figure up onto the walls in enormous dark transparency with the shift burned away and the bones all but showing and then passing cast her reeling backwards to vanish once more into the dark. A man pulled up in a car and drove beside her and talked to her in low obscenities. He pulled ahead and waited. She turned into a dirt alley between two buildings and crouched shivering behind some battered steel oildrums. She waited a long time. It was very cold. When she went out again the car was gone and she went on. She passed a lot where a dog lunged at her silently along a fence and then stood in the fencecorner shrouded in its own breath silently watching her go. She passed a darkened house and a yard where an old man also in nightclothes stood urinating against a mud wall and these two nodded silently to each other across the darkened space like figures met in a dream. The sidewalk gave out and she walked on in the cold sand along the roadside and stopped from time to time to stand tottering while she picked the little goathead burrs from the soles of her bleeding feet. She kept the haze of light from the city before her and she walked a long time. When she crossed the Boulevard 16 de Septiembre she kept her arms folded tightly at her bosom and her eyes lowered in the glare of the headlights, crossing half naked in a hooting of carhorns like some tattered phantom routed out of the ordinal dark and hounded briefly through the visible world to vanish again into the history of men's dreams.

She went on through the barrios north of the city, along the old mud walls and the tin sides of warehouses where the sand streets were lit only by the stars. Someone was singing on the road a song from her own childhood and she soon passed a woman walking toward the city. They spoke good evening each to each and passed on but the woman stopped and turned and called after her.

Ad-nde va? she called.

A mi casa.

The woman stood quietly. The girl asked do I know you but the woman said that she did not. She asked the girl if this were her barrio and the girl said that it was and the woman then asked her how it could be that she did not know her. When she did not answer the woman came slowly back down the road toward her.

QuZ pas-? she said.

Nada.

Nada, the woman said. She walked in a half circle around her where she stood shivering with her arms crossed over her breasts. As if to find some favored inclination in the blue light of the desert stars by which she would stand revealed for who she trulywas.

Eres del White Lake, she said.

The girl nodded.

Y regresas?

S'.

Por quZ?

No sZ.

No sabes.

No.

Quieres it conmigo?

No puedo.

PorquZ no?

She didnt know. The woman asked her again. She said that she could come with her and live in her house where she lived with her children.

The girl whispered that she did not know her.

Te gusta to vida Por all++? the woman said.

No.

Ven conmigo.

She stood shivering. She shook her head no. The sun was coming soon. In the dark above them a star fell and in the cold wind before the dawn papers loped and clutched and rattled briefly in the spines of the roadside growth and loped on again. The woman looked toward the desert sky to the east. She looked at the girl. She asked the girl if she was cold and she said that she was. She asked her again: Quieres it conmigo?

She said that she could not. She said that in three days' time the boy she loved would come to marry her. She thanked her for her kindness.

The woman raised the girl's face in her hand and looked at her. The girl waited for her to speak but she only looked into 'her face as if to remember her. Perhaps to read at second hand the shapes of the roads that had led her to this place. What was lost or what was ruined. Whom bereft. Or what remained.

C-mo se llama? the girl said, but the woman did not answer. She touched the girl's face and took away her hand and turned and went on along the dark of the road out of the darkened barrio and did not look back.

Eduardo's car was gone. She crept shivering along the alley under the warehouse wall and tried the door but it was locked. She tapped and waited and tapped again. She waited a long time. After a while she went back out to the street. Her breath pluming in the light along the corrugated wall. She looked back down the alley again and then went around to the front of the building and through the gate and up the walkway.

The portress with her painted face seemed unsurprised to see her standing there clutching herself in the stenciled shift. She stepped back and held the door and the girl entered and thanked her and went on through the salon. Two men standing at the bar turned to watch her. Pale and dirty waif drifted by mischance in from the outer cold to cross the room with eyes cast down and arms crossed at her breasts. Leaving bloody footprints in the carpet as if a penitent had passed.

HE SEEMED to have dressed with care for the occasion although it may have been that he had business elsewhere in the city. He slid back the goldlinked cuff of his shirt to consult his watch. His suit was of light gray silk shantung and he wore a silk tie of the same color. His shirt was a pale lemon yellow and he wore a yellow silk handkerchief in the breastpocket of the suit and the lowcut black boots with the zippers up the inner sides were freshly polished for he left his shoes outside his door several pair at a time as if the whorehouse hallway were a Pullman car.

She sat in the saffroncolored robe he'd given her. Upon the antique bed where her feet did not quite reach the floor. She sat with her head bowed so that her hair cascaded over her thighs and she sat with her hands placed on the bed at either side of her as if she might be afraid of falling.

He spoke in reasoned tones the words of a reasonable man. The more reasonably he spoke the colder the wind in the hollow of her heart. At each juncture in her case he paused to give her space in which to speak but she did not speak and her silence only led inexorably to the next succeeding charge until that structure which was composed of nothing but the spoken word and which should have passed on in its very utterance and left no trace or residue or shadow in the living world, that bodiless structure stood in the room a ponderable being and within its phantom corpus was contained her life.

When he was done he stood watching her. He asked her what she had to say. She shook her head.

Nada? he said.

No, she said. Nada.

QuZ crees que eres?

Nada.

Nada. S'. Pero piensas que has traido una dispensa especial a esta casa? Que Dios to ha escogido?

Nunca cre' tal cosa.

He turned and stood looking out the small barred window. Along the limits of the city where the roads died in the desert in sand washes and garbage dumps, out to the white perimeters at midday where smoke from the trashfires burned along the horizon like the signature of vandal hordes come in off the inscrutable wastes beyond. He spoke without turning. He said that she had been spoiled in this house. Because of her youth. He said that her illness was illness only and that she was a fool to believe in the superstitions of the women of the house. He said that she was twice a fool to trust them for they would eat her flesh if they thought it would protect them from disease or secure for them the affections of the lover of whom they dreamt or cleanse their souls in the sight of the bloody and barbarous god to whom they prayed. He said that her illness was illness only and that it would so prove itself when at last it killed her as it soon would do.

He turned to study her. The slope of her shoulders and their movement with the rise and fall of her breath. The bloodbeat in the artery of her neck. When she looked up and saw his face she knew that he had seen into her heart. What was so and what was false. He smiled his hardlipped smile. Your lover does not know, he said. You have not told him.

Mande?

Tu amado no to sabe.

No, she whispered. fl no to sabe.

HE SET OUT the pieces loosely on the board and swiveled it about. I'll go you one more, he said.

Mac shook his head. He held the cigar and blew smoke slowly over the table and then picked up his cup and drained the last of his coffee.

I'm done, he said.

Yessir. You played a good game.

I didnt believe you'd sacrifice a bishop.

That was one of Schonberger's gambits.

You read a lot of chess books?

No sir. Not a lot. I read his.

You told me you played poker.

Some. Yessir.

Why do I think that means somethin else.

I never played that much poker. My daddy was a poker player. He always said that the problem with poker was you played with two kinds of money. What you won was gravy but what you lost was hard come by.

Was he a good poker player?

Yessir. He was one of the best, I reckon. He cautioned me away from it though. He said it was not any kind of a life.

Why did he do it if he thought that?

It was the only other thing he was good at.

What was the first thing?

He was a cowboy.

I take it he was pretty good at that.

Yessir. I've heard of some that was supposed to be better and I'm sure there were some better. I just never did see any of em.

He was on the death march, wasnt he?

Yessir.

There was a lot of boys from this part of the country was on it. Quite a few of em Mexicans.

Yessir. There was.

Mac pulled at his cigar and blew the smoke toward the window. Has Billy come around or are you and him still on the outs?

He's all right.

Is he still goin to stand up for you?

Yessir.

Mac nodded. She aint got nobody to stand on her side?

No sir. Socorro is bringin her family.

That's good. I aint been in my suit in three years. I'd better make a dry run in it, Ireckon.

John Grady put the last of the pieces in the box and fitted and slid shut the wooden lid.

Might need Socorro to let out the britches for me.

They sat. Mac smoked. You aint Catholic are you? he said.

No sir.

I wont need to make no disclaimers or nothin?

No sir.

So Tuesday's the day.

Yessir. February seventeenth. It's the last day before Lent. Or I guess next to last. After that you cant get married till Easter.

Is that cuttin it kindly close?

It'll be all right.

Mac nodded. He put the cigar in his teeth and pushed back the chair. Wait here a minute, he said.

John Grady listened to him going down the hall to his room. When he came back he sat down and placed a gold ring on the table.

That's been in my dresser drawer for three years. It aint doin nobody any good there and it never will. We talked about everthing and we talked about that ring. She didnt want it put in the ground. I want you to take it.

Sir I dont think I can do that.

Yes you can. I've already thought of everthing you could possibly say on the subject so rather than go over it item by item let's just save the aggravation and you put it in your pocket and come Tuesday you put it on that girl's finger. You might need to get it resized. The woman that wore it was a beautiful woman. You can ask anybody, it wasnt just my opinion. But what you saw wouldnt hold a candle to what was on the inside. We would like to of had children but we didnt. It damn sure wasnt from not tryin. Shewas a woman with a awful lot of common sense. I thought she just wanted me to keep that ring for a remembrance but she said I'd know what to do with it when the time come and of course she was right. She was right about everthing. And there's no pride in it when I tell you that she set more store by that ring and what it meant than anything else she ever owned. And that includes some pretty damn fine horses. So take it and put it in your pocket and dont be arguin with me about everthing.

Yessir.

And now I'm goin to bed.

Yessir.

Goodnight.

Goodnight.

FROM THE PASS in the upper range of the Jarillas they could see the green of the benchland below the springs and they could see the thin standing spire of smoke from the fire in the stove rising vertically in the still blue morning air. They sat their horses. Billy nodded at the scene.

When I was a kid growin up in the bootheel me and my brother used to stop where we topped out on this bench south of the ranch goin up into the mountains and we'd look back down at the house. It would be snowin sometimes or snow on the ground in the winter and there was always a fire in the stove and you could see the smoke from the chimney and it was a long ways away and it looked different from up there. Always looked different. It was different. We'd be gone up in the mountains sometimes all day throwin them spooky cattle out of the draws and bringin em down to the feedstation where we'd put out cake. I dont think there was ever a time we didnt stop and look back thataway before we rode up into that country. From where we'd stop we were not a hour away and the coffee was still hot on the stove down there but it was worlds away. Worlds away.

In the distance they could see the thin straight line of the highway and a toysized truck running silently upon it. Beyond that the green line of the river breaks and range on range the distant mountains of Mexico. Billy watched him.

You think you'll ever go back there?

Where?

Mexico.

I dont know. I'd like to. You?

I dont think so. I think I'm done.

I came out of there on the run. Ridin at night. Afraid to make a fire.

Been shot.

Been shot. Those people would take you in. Hide you out. Lie for you. No one ever asked me what it was I'd done.

Billy sat with his hands crossed palm down on the pommel of his saddle. He leaned and spat. I went down there three separate trips. I never once come back with what I started after.

John Grady nodded. What would you do if you couldnt be a cowboy?

I dont know. I reckon I'd think of somethin. You?

I dont know what it would be I'd think oPS

Well we may all have to think of somethin.

Yeah.

You think you could live in Mexico?

Yeah. Probably.

Billy nodded. You know what a vaquero makes in the way of wages.

Yep.

You might luck up on a job as foreman or somethin. But sooner or later they're goin to run all the white people out of that country. Even the Bab'cora wont survive.

I know it.

You'd go to veterinary school if you had the money I reckon. Wouldnt you?

Yep. I would.

You ever write to your mother?

What's my mother got to do with anything?

Nothin. I just wonder if you even know what a outlaw you are.

Why?

Why do I wonder it?

Why am I a outlaw.

I dont know. You just got a outlaw heart. I've seen it before.

Because I said I could live in Mexico?

It aint just that.

Dont you think if there's anything left of this life it's down there?

Maybe.

You like it too.

Yeah? I dont even know what this life is. I damn sure dont know what Mexico is. I think it's in your head. Mexico. I rode a lot of ground down there. The first ranchera you hear sung you understand the whole country. By the time you've heard a hundred you dont know nothin. You never will. I concluded my business down there a long time ago.

He hooked his leg over the pommel of the saddle and sat rolling a cigarette. They'd dropped the reins and the horses leaned and picked bleakly at the sparse tufts of grass trembling in the wind coming through the gap. He bent with his back to the wind and popped a match with his thumbnail and lit the cigarette and turned back.

I aint the only one. It's another world. Everbody I ever knew that ever went back was goin after somethin. Or thought they was.

Yeah.

There's a difference between quittin and knowin when you're beat.

John Grady nodded.

I guess you dont believe that. Do you?

John Grady studied the distant mountains. No, he said. I guess I dont.

They sat for a long time. The wind blew. Billy had long since finished his cigarette and stubbed it out on the sole of his boot.

He unfolded his leg back over the horn of the saddle and slid his boot into the stirrup and leaned down and took up the reins. The horses stepped and stood.

My daddy once told me that some of the most miserable people he ever knew were the ones that finally got what they'd always wanted.

Well, said John Grady. I'm willin to risk it. I've damn sure tried it the other way.

Yeah.

You cant tell anybody anything, bud. Hell, it's really just a way of tellin yourself. And you cant even do that. You just try and use your best judgment and that's about it.

Yeah. Well. The world dont know nothin about your judgment.

I know it. It's worse than that, even. It dont care.

QUINQUAGESIMA SUNDAY in the predawn dark she lit a candle and set the candledish on the floor beside the bureau where the light would not show beneath the doorway to the outer hall. She washed herself at the sink with soap and cloth and she leaned and let her black hair fall before her and passed the wet cloth the length of it a half a hundred times and brushed it as many more. She poured a frugal few drops of scent into her palm and pressed her palms together and scented her hair and the nape of her neck. Then she gathered her hair and twisted it into a rope and coiled and pinned it up.

She dressed with care in one of the three street dresses she owned and stood regarding herself in the dimly lit mirror. The dress was navy blue with white bands at the collar and sleeves and she turned in the mirror and reached over her shoulder and fastened the topmost buttons and turned again. She sat in the chair and pulled on the black pump shoes and stood and went to the bureau and got her purse and put into it the few toilet articles it would hold. No coja nada, she whispered. She folded in her clean underwear and her brush and combs and forced the catch shut. No coja nada. She took her sweater from the back of the chair and pulled it over her shoulders and turned to look at the room she would never see again. The crude carved Santo stood as before. Holding his staff so crookedly glued. She took a towel from the rack by the washstand and she wrapped the santo in the towel and then she sat in the chair with the Santo in her lap and the purse hanging from her shoulder and waited.

She waited a long time. She had no watch. She listened for the bells to toll in the distant town but sometimes when the wind was coming in off the desert you could not hear them. By and by she heard a rooster call. Finally she heard the slippered steps of the criada along the corridor and she rose as the door opened and the old woman looked in on her and turned and looked back down the hallway and then entered with her hand fanned before her and one finger to her lips and pressed the door shut silently behind her.

Lista? she hissed.

S'. Lista.

Bueno. V++monos.

The old woman gave a hitch of her shoulder and a sort of half jaunty cock of her head. Some powdered stepdam from a storybook. Some ragged conspiratress gesturing upon the boards. The girl clutched her purse and stood and put the santo under her arm and the old woman opened the door and peered out and then urged her forward with her hand and they stepped out into the hallway.

Her shoes clicked on the tiles. The old woman looked down and the girl bent slightly and raised her feet each in turn and slipped off the shoes and tucked them under her arm along with the Santo.

The old woman shut the door behind them and they moved down the hallway, the crone holding her hand like a child's and tugging at her apron to sort forth her keys where they hung by their thong from the piece of broomhandle.

At the outer door she stood and put her shoes on again while the old woman muffled the heavy latch with her rebozo and turned it with her key. Then the door opened onto the cold and the dark.

They stood facing one another. R++pido, r++pido, whispered the old woman and the girl pressed the money that she had promised into her hands and then threw her arms around her neck and kissed her dry and leather cheek and turned and stepped through the door. On the step she turned to take the old woman's blessing but the criada was too distraught to respond and before she could step away from out of the doorway light the old woman had reached and seized her arm.

No to vayas, she hissed. No to vayas.

The girl tore her arm away from the old woman's grip. The sleeve of her dress ripped loose along the shoulder seam. No, she whispered, backing away. No.

The old woman held out one hand. She called hoarsely after her. No to vayas, she called. Me equivoquZ.

The girl clutched her Santo and her purse and went down the alleyway. Before she reached the end she turned and looked back a last time. La Tuerta was still standing in the door watching her. Holding the clutch of pesos to her breast. Then her eye blinked slowly in the light and the door closed and the key turned and the bolt ran forever on that world.

She went down the alleyway to the road and turned toward the town. Dogs were barking and the air was smoky from the charcoal fires in the low mud hovels of the colonias. She walked along the sandy desert road. The stars in flood above her. The lower edges of the firmament sawed out into the black shapes of the mountains and the lights of the cities burning on the plain like stars pooled in a lake. She sang to herself softly as she went a song from long ago. The dawn was two hours away. The town one.

There were no cars on the road. From a rise she could see to the east across the desert five miles distant the random lights of trucks moving slowly upon the highway that came up from Chihuahua. The air was still. She could see her breath in the dark. She watched the lights of a car that crossed from left to right somewhere before her and she watched the lights move on. Somewhere out there in the world was Eduardo.

When she reached the crossroads she studied the distance in either direction for any sign of approaching carlights before she crossed. She kept to the narrow streets down through the barrios in the outlying precincts of the city. Already there were windows lit with oillamps behind the walls of ocotillo or woven brush. She began to come upon occasional workmen with their lunches in lardcans they carried by the bail, whistling softly as they set forth in the early morning cold. Her feet were bleeding again in her shoes and she could feel the wet blood and the coldness of it.

The cafe held the only light along the Calle de Noche Triste. In the darkened window of the adjacent shoestore a cat sat silently among the footwear watching the empty street. It turned its head to regard her as she passed. She pushed open the steamed glass door of the cafe and entered.

Two men at a table by the window looked up when she came in and followed her with their eyes as she went by. She went to the rear and sat at one of the little wooden tables and put her purse and her parcel in the chair beside her and took up the menu from the chrome wire stand and sat looking at it. The waiter came over. She ordered a cafecito and he nodded and went back to the counter. It was warm in the cafe and after a while she took off the sweater and laid it in the chair. The men were still watching her. The waiter brought the coffee and set it before her with spoon and napkin. She was surprised to hear him ask where she was from.

Mande? she said.

De d-nde viene?

She told him she was from Chiapas and he stood for a moment studying her as if to see how such people might be different from those he knew. He said that he'd been told to ask by one of the men.When she turned and looked at them they smiled but there was no joy in it. She looked at the waiter. Estoy esperando a un amigo, she said.

Por supuesto, said the waiter.

She sat over the coffee a long time. The street outside grew gray in the February dawn. The two men at the front of the cafe had long since finished their coffee and left and others had come to take their place. The shops remained closed. A few trucks passed in the street and people were coming in out of the cold and a waitress was now going from table to table.

Shortly after seven a blue taxi pulled up at the door and the driver got out and came in and canvassed the tables with his eyes. He came to the rear of the cafe and looked down at her.

Lista? he said.

D-nde est++ Ram-n?

He stood picking at his teeth reflectively. He said that Ram-n could not come.

She looked toward the front of the cafe. The cab stood in the street with the engine running in the cold.

Est++ bien, said the driver. V++monos. Debemos darnos prisa.

She asked him if he knew John Grady and he nodded and waved the toothpick. S', s', he said. He said that he knew everyone. She looked again at the cab smoking in the street.

He had stepped back to allow her to rise. He looked down at the chair where she'd put her purse. The Santo wrapped in the whorehouse towel. She placed her hand over these things. Which he might wish to carry for her. She asked him who it was who had paid him.

He put the toothpick back in his mouth and stood looking at her. Finally he said that he had not been paid. He said that he was cousin to Ram-n and that Ram-n had been paid forty dollars. He put his hand on the back of the empty chair and stood looking down at her. Her shoulders were rising and falling with her breath. Like someone about to attempt a feat of strength. She said that she did not know.

He leaned down. Mire, he said. Su novio. fl tiene una cicatriz aqu'. He passed his forefinger across his cheek to trace the path of the knife that had made the scar her lover carried from the fight three years ago in the comedor of the c++rcel at Cuellar in the city of Saltillo. Verdad? he said.

S', she whispered. Es verdad. Y tiene mi tarjeta verde?

S'. He took the greencard from his pocket and placed it on the table. On the card was printed her name.

Est++ satisfecha? he said.

S', she whispered. Estoy satisfecha. And rose and gathered up her things and left money on the table to pay for the coffee and followed him out into the street.

In the cold dawn all that halfsordid world was coming to light again and as she rode in silence in the rear of the cab through the waking streets she clutched the illcarved wooden relic and said a silent goodbye to everything she knew and to each thing she would not see again. She said goodbye to an old woman in a black rebozo come to a door to see what sort of day it was and she said goodbye to three girls her age stepping with care around the water standing in the street from the recent rains who were on their way to Mass and she said goodbye to dogs and to old men at streetcorners and to vendors pushing their carts through the street to commence their day and to shopkeepers opening their doors and to the women who knelt with pail and rag to wash the walkway tiles. She said goodbye to the small birds strung shoulder to shoulder along the lightwires overhead who had slept and were waking and whose name she would never know.

They passed through the outskirts of the city and she could see the river to the left through the river trees and the tall buildings of the city beyond that were in another country and the barren mountains where the sun would soon fall upon the rocks. They passed the old abandoned municipal buildings. Rusted watertanks in a yard strewn with trashpapers the wind had left. The sudden thin iron palings of a fence that ratcheted silently past the window from right to left and which in their passing and in the period of their passing began to evoke the dormant sorcerer within before she could tear her gaze away. She put her hands to her eyes, breathing deeply. In the darkness inside the cups of her palms she saw herself on a cold white table in a cold white room. The glass of the doors and the windows to that room were meshed with heavy wire and clamoring there were whores and whores' handmaids many in number and all crying out to her. She sat upright on the table and threw back her head as if she would cry out or as if she would sing. Like some young diva remanded to a madhouse. No sound came. The cold pneuma passed. She should have called it back. When she opened her eyes the cab had turned off the road and was jostling over a bare dirt track and the driver was watching her in the mirror. She looked out but she could not see the bridge. She could see the river through the trees and the mist coming off the river and the raw rock mountains beyond but she could not see the city. She saw a figure moving among the trees by the river. She asked the driver if they were to cross here to the other side and he said yes. He said that she would be going to the other side now. Then the cab pulled into the clearing and came to a stop and when she looked what she saw coming toward her across the clearing in the earliest light of morning was the smiling Tiburcio.

HE'D LEFT THE RANCH around five and driven to the darkened front of the bar where he could see the dimly lit face of the clock within. He backed the truck around on the gravel apron so that he could watch the road and he tried not to turn around to look at the clock every few minutes but he did.

Few cars passed. Shortly after six oclock a set of headlights slowed and he sat upright over the steering wheel and cleared the glass with the forearm of his jacket but the lights went past and the car was not a taxi but a sheriff's prowlcar. He thought they might come back and ask him what he was doing there but they didnt. It was very cold sitting in the truck and after a while he got out and walked around and flailed at himself with his arms and stamped his boots. Then he got back in the truck. The bar clock said sixthirty. When he looked to the east he could see the gray shape of the landscape.

The lights of the gas station a half mile down the highway went out. A truck went down the highway. He wondered if he could drive down there and get a cup of coffee before the cab arrived. By eightthirty he'd decided that if that was what it would take to make the cab arrive then that's what he would do and he started the engine. Then he shut it off again.

A half hour later he saw Travis's truck go by on the highway. In a few minutes it came back and slowed and pulled into the parking lot. John Grady rolled down the truck window. Travis pulled up and sat looking at him. He leaned and spat.

What'd they do, give you your time?

Not yet.

I thought maybe the truck was stole. You ain't broke down are you?

No. I was just waitin on somebody.

How long you been here?

I been here a while.

Has that thing got a heater in it?

Not much of a one.

Travis shook his head. He looked toward the highway. John Grady leaned and cleared the glass again with his sleeve. I bet?ter get on, he said.

Are you in some kind of trouble?

Yeah. Maybe.

Over a girl, I reckon.

Yeah.

They aint worth it, son.

I've heard that.

Well. Dont do nothin dumb.

It's probably too late.

It aint too late if you aint done it.

I'm all right.

He reached and turned the key and pushed the starter but?ton. He turned and looked at Travis. I'll see you, he said.

He pulled out of the parking lot and headed back up the highway. Travis sat watching the truck until it was out of sight.