The Crossing

IV

HE CROSSED THE BORDER at Columbus New Mexico. The guard in the gateshack studied him briefly and waved him through. As if he saw his like too often these days to be in doubt about him. Billy halted the horse anyway. I'm an American, he said, if I dont look like it.

You look like you might of left some bacon down there, the guard said.

I aint come back rich, that's for sure.

I guess you come back to sign up.

I reckon. If I can find a outfit that'll have me.

You neednt to worry about that. You aint got flat feet have you,

Flat feet?

Yeah. You got flat feet they wont take you.

What the hell are you talkin about?

Talkin about the army.

Army?

Yeah. The army. How long you been gone anyways?

I dont have no idea. I dont even know what month this is.

You dont know what's happened?

No. What's happened?

Hell fire, boy. This country's at war.

He took the long straight clay road north to Deming. The day was cold and he wore the blanket over his shoulders. The knees were out of his trousers and his boots were falling apart. The pockets which had hung by threads from his shirt he'd long ago torn off and thrown awayaEU' and the back of the shirt where it had separated was sewn with agave and the collar of his jacket had separated and the shredded facing stood about his neck like some tawdry sort of lace and gave him the improbable look of a ruined dandy. The few cars that passed gave him all the berth that narrow road afforded and the people looked back at him through the rolling dust as if he were a thing wholly alien in that landscape. Something from an older time of which they'd only heard. Something of which they'd read. He rode all day and he crossed in the evening through the low foothills of the Florida Mountains and he rode on across the upland plain into the dusk and into the dark. In that dark he passed a file of five horsemen riding south back the way he'd come and he spoke to them in spanish and wished them a good evening and they spoke back to him each one in their soft voices as they passed. As if the closeness of the dark and the straitness of the way had made of them confederates. Or as if only there would confederates be found.

He rode into Deming at midnight and rode the main street from one end to the other. The horse's shoeless hooves clapping dully on the blacktop in the silence. It was bitter cold. Nothing was open. He spent the night in the bus station at the corner of Spruce and Gold, sleeping on the tile floor wrapped in the filthy serape with his warbag for a pillow and the stained and filthy hat over his face. The sweatblackened saddle stood against the wall along with the shotgun in its scabbard. He slept with his boots on and he got up twice in the night and went out to see about his horse where he'd left it tethered to a lampstandard by the catchrope.

In the morning when the cafe opened he went up to the counter and asked the woman where you went to join the army. She said that the recruiting office was at the armory on South Silver Street but she didnt think they'd be open this early.

Thank you mam, he said.

You want some coffee?

No mam. I aint got no money.

Set down, she said.

Yes mam.

He sat on one of the stools and she brought him a cup of coffee in a white china mug. He thanked her and sat drinking it. After a while she came from the grill and set a plate of eggs and bacon in front of him and a plate of toast.

Dont tell nobody where you got it, she said.

The recruiting office was closed when he got there and he was waiting on the steps with two boys from Deming and a third from an outlying ranch when the sergeant arrived and unlocked the door.

They stood in front of his desk. He studied them.

Which one of you all aint eighteen, he said.

No one answered.

They's usually about one in four and I see four recruits in front of me.

I aint but seventeen, Billy said.

The sergeant nodded. Well, he said. You'll have to get your mama to sign for you.

I dont have no mama. She's dead.

What about your daddy?

He's dead too.

Well you'll have to get your next of kin. Uncle or whatever. He'll need to get a notarized statement.

I dont have no next of kin. I just got a brother and he's youngern me.

Where do you work at?

I dont work nowheres.

The sergeant leaned back in his chair. Where are you from? he said.

From over towards Cloverdale.

You got to have some kin.

Not that I know of I dont.

The sergeant tapped his pencil on the desk. He looked out the window. He looked at the other boys.

You all want to join the army, he said.

They looked at one another. Yessir, they said.

You dont sound real sure.

Yessir, they said.

He shook his head and swiveled his chair and rolled a printed form into his typewriter.

I want to join the cavalry, the boy from the ranch said. My daddy was in the cavalry in the last war.

Well son you just tell em when you get to Fort Bliss that that's what you want to do.

Yessir. Do I need to take my saddle with me?

You dont need to take a thing in the world. They're goin to look after you like your own mother.

Yessir.

He took their names and dates of birth and next of kin and their addresses one by one and he signed four mealvouchers and gave them to them and he gave them directions to the doctor's office where they were to get their physical examinations and he gave them the forms for that.

You all should be done and back here right after dinner, he said.

What about me? Billy said.

Just wait here. The rest of you all take off now. I'll see you back here this afternoon.

When they'd left the sergeant handed Billy his forms and his voucher.

You look there at the bottom of that second sheet, he said. That's a parental consent form. If you want to join this man's army you better bring it back with your mama's signature on it. If she has to come down from heaven to do it I dont have a problem in the world with that. You understand what I'm tellin you?

Yessir. I guess you want me to sign my dead mama's name on that piece of paper.

I didnt say that. Did you hear me say that? No sir.

Go on then. I'll see you back here after dinner. Yessir.

He turned and went out. There were people standing in the door behind him and they stood aside to let him pass.

Parham, the sergeant said.

He turned. Yessir, he said.

You come back here this afternoon now, you hear?

Yessir.

You aint got noplace else to go.

He walked across the street and untied his horse and mounted up and rode back up Silver Street and up West Spruce, holding the papers in his hand. All the streets east and west were trees, north and south minerals. He tied his horse in front of the Manhattan Cafe cattycorner from the bus station. Next to it was the Victoria Land and Cattle Company and two men in the narrowbrimmed hats and walkingheel boots that landowners wore were standing on the sidewalk talking. They looked at him when he passed and he nodded but they didnt nod back.

He slid into the booth and laid the papers on the table and looked at the menu. When the waitress came he started to order the plate lunch but she said that lunch didnt start till eleven oclock. She said he could get breakfast.

I've done eat one breakfast today.

Well we dont have no city ordinance about how many breakfasts you can eat.

How big of a breakfast can I get?

How big of a one can you eat?

I've got a mealticket from the recruitin office.

I know it. I see it layin yonder.

Can I get four eggs?

You just tell me how you want em.

She brought the breakfast on an oblong crockery platter with the four eggs over medium and a slice of fried ham and grits with butter and she brought a plate of biscuits and a small bowl of gravy.

You want anything else you let me know, she said.

All right.

You want a sweetroll?

Yes mam.

You need some more coffee?

Yes mam.

He looked up at her. She was about forty years old and she had black hair and bad teeth. She grinned at him. I like to see a man eat, she said.

Well, he said. You're lookin at one I believe ought to meet your requirements.

When he was done eating he sat drinking coffee and studying the form his mother was supposed to sign. He sat studying it and thinking about it and after a while he asked the waitress if she could bring him a fountainpen.

She brought it and handed it to him. Dont carry it off, she said. It aint mine.

I wont.

She left to go back to the counter and he bent over the form and wrote on the line Louisa May Parham. His mother's name was Carolyn.

When he walked out the other three boys were coming up the sidewalk toward the cafe. They were talking together like they'd all been friends forever. When they saw him they stopped talking and he spoke to them and asked them how they were doing and they said they were doing all right and entered the cafe.

The doctor's name was Moir and his office was out on West Pine. By the time he got there there were half a dozen people waiting, mostly young men and boys sitting holding their recruiting forms. He gave his name to the nurse at the desk and sat in a chair and waited along with the others.

When the nurse finally called his name he was asleep and he jerked awake and looked around and he didnt know where he was.

Parham, she said again.

He stood up. That's me, he said.

The nurse handed him a form and he stood in the hallway while she held a card over his eye and told him to read the chart on the wall. He read it to the bottom letter and she tested the other eye.

You got good eyes, she said.

Yes mam, he said. I always did.

Well I guess so, she said. You dont normally start out with bad ones and they get better.

When he went into the doctor's office the doctor had him sit in a chair and he looked in his eyes with a flashlight and he put a cold instrument in his ear and looked in there. He told him to unbutton his shirt.

You came here horseback, he said.

Yessir.

Where did you come from.

Mexico.

I see. Have you got any history of disease in your family?

No sir. They're all dead.

I see, the doctor said.

He put the cool cone of the stethoscope against the boy's chest and listened. He thumped his chest with the tips of his fingers. He put the stethoscope to his chest again and listened with his eyes closed. He sat up and took the tubes from his ears and leaned back in his chair. You've got a heartmurmur, he said.

What does that mean?

It means you wont be joining the army.

He worked for a stable out on the highwayaEU' for ten days and slept in a stall until he had money for clothes and for the busfare to El Paso and he left the horse with the owner of the lot and set out east in a new duckingcloth workcoat and a new blue shirt with pearl buttons.

It was a cold and blustery day in El Paso. He found the recruiting office and the clerk filled out the same forms over again and he stood in line with a number of men and they undressed and put their clothes in a basket and were given a brass chit with a number on it and then they stood in line naked holding their papers.

When he reached the examining station he handed the doctor his medical form and the doctor looked in his mouth and into his ears. Then he put the stethoscope to his chest. He told him to turn around and he put the stethoscope to his back and listened. Then he listened to his chest again. Then he picked up a stamp from the desk and stamped Billy's form and signed it and picked up the form and handed it to him.

I cant pass you, he said.

What's wrong with me.

You've got an irregularity in your heartbeat.

There aint nothin wrong with my heart.

Yes there is.

Will I die?

Sometime. It's probably not all that serious. But it will keep you out of the army.

You could pass me if you wanted to.

I could. But I wont. They'd find it somewhere down the line anyway. Sooner or later.

It was not yet noon when he walked out and down San Antonio Street. He went down South El Paso Street to the Splendid Cafe and ate the plate lunch and walked back to the bus station and he was in Deming again before dark.

In the morning when he walked up the barn bay Mr Chandler was sorting through tack in the saddleroom. He looked up. Well, he said. Did you get in the army?

No sir, I didnt. They turned me down.

Well I'm sorry to hear it.

Yessir. I am too.

What do you aim to do?

I'm goin to try em in Albuquerque.

Son they got a awful lot of recruitin offices set up all over the country. A man could make a career out of it.

I know it. I'm goin to try it one more time.

He worked on to the end of the week and drew his pay and took the bus out on Sunday morning. He was all day on the road. Night set in just north of Socorro and the sky was filled with flights of waterfowl circling and dropping in to the river marshlands east of the highway. He watched with his face to the cold and darkening glass of the window. He listened for their cries but he could not hear them above the drone of the bus.

He slept at the YMCA and he was at the recruiting office when they opened in the morning and he was on the bus south again before noon. He'd asked the doctor if there was any medicine he could take but the doctor said that there was not. He asked if there was something you could take that would make it run all right just for a while.

Where are you from, the doctor said.

Cloverdale New Mexico.

How many different recruiting offices have you tried to enlist at?

This makes the third one.

Son, even if we did have a deaf doctor we wouldnt put him to listening to recruits with a stethoscope. I think you need to just go on home.

I dont have one to go to.

I thought you said you were from somethingdale. Where was it?

Cloverdale.

Cloverdale.

I was but I aint no more. I dont have anyplace to go. I think I need to be in the army. If I'm goin to die anyways why not use me? I aint afraid.

I wish I could, the doctor said. But I cant. It's not up to me. I have to follow regulations like everybody else. We turn away good men every day.

Yessir.

Who told you you were going to die?

I dont know. They never told me I wasnt goin to.

Well, the doctor said. They couldnt very well tell you that even if you had a heart like a horse. Could they

No sir. I reckon not.

Go on now.

Sir?

Go on now.

When the bus pulled into the lot behind the bus station at Deming it was three oclock in the morning. He walked out to Chandler's and went to the saddleroom and got his saddle and went to the stall and led Nino out into the bay and threw the saddleblanket over him. It was very cold. The barn was oak batboards and he could see the horse's breath pass across the slats lit from the single yellow bulb outside. The groom Ruiz came and stood in the door with his blanket around his shoulders. He watched while Billy saddled the horse. He asked him if he had succeeded in joining the army.

No, Billy said.

Lo siento.

Yo tambien.

Adonde va?

No se.

Regresa a Mexico?

No.

Ruiz nodded. Buen viaje, he said.

Gracias.

He led the horse out down the barn bay and through the door and mounted up and rode out.

He rode through the town and took the old road south to Hermanas and Hachita. The horse was newly shod and in good plight from the grain it had been fed on and he rode the sun up and he rode all day and rode it down again and rode on into the night. He slept on the high plain wrapped in his blanket and rose shivering before dawn and rode on again. He quit the road just west of Hachita and rode through the foothills of the Little Hatchet Mountains and struck the railroad coming out of the Phelps Dodge smelter to the south and crossed the tracks and reached the shallow salt lake at sunset.

There was water standing in the flats as far as he could see and the sunset on the water had turned it to a lake of blood. He tried to put the horse forward but the horse could not see across the lake and balked and would not go. He turned and rode south along the flats. Gillespie Mountain lay covered in snow and beyond that the Animas Peaks standing in the last of that day's sun with the snow lying red in the rincons. And far to the south the pale and ancient cordilleras of Mexico impounding the visible world. He came to the remnants of an old fence and dismounted and twisted out the staples from some of the spindly posts and made a fire and sat with his boots crossed before him staring into it. The horse stood in the dark at the edge of the fire and gazed bleakly at the barren salt ground. It's your own doin, the boy said. I got no sympathy for you.

They crossed the flat shallow lake in the morning and before noon they struck the old Playas road and followed it west into the mountains. There was snow in the pass and not a track in it. They rode down into the beautiful Animas Valley and took the road south from Animas and reached the Sanders ranch about two hours past nightfall.

He called from the gate and the girl came out on the porch.

It's Billy Parham, he called.

Who?

Billy Parham.

Come up Billy Parham, she called.

When he entered the parlor Mr Sanders stood. He was older, smaller, more frail. Get in this house, he said.

I'm awful dirty to come in.

You come on in. We thought you'd died.

No sir. Not yet I aint.

The old man shook his hand and held it. He was looking past him toward the door. Where's that Boyd at? he said.

They ate in the diningroom. The girl served them and then sat down. They ate roast beef and potatoes and beans and the girl passed him a bread dish covered with a linen cloth and he took a piece of cornbread and buttered it. This is awful good, he said.

She's a good cook, the old man said. I hope she dont decide to get married and quit me. If I had to cook for myself the cats'd leave.

Oh Grandaddy, the girl said.

They wanted to put Miller fouraEU'F too, the old man said. On account of his leg. They took him up at Albuquerque. They run em through up there I reckon in wholesale lots.

They didnt me. Are they goin to put him in the cavalry?

I dont think so. I dont think they're even goin to have one. He looked out across the table, chewing slowly. In the yellow light of the pressed glass chandelier the old photographs and portraits above the sideboard seemed like artifacts salvaged from some ancient removal. Even the old man seemed distant from them. From the sepiaaEU'tinted buildings, the old shake roofs. The people on horseback. Men sitting among cardboard cactus in a photographer's studio in suits and ties with the legs of their breeches stogged into their boottops and rifles standing upright before them. The antique dresses of the women. The wary or haunted cast to their eyes. Like people photographed at gunpoint.

That's John Slaughter in that picture at the end yonder.

Which one?

That last one on the top right under Miller's certificate. That was took in front of his house.

Who's the Indian girl?

That's Apache May. They brought her back from a Indian camp they raided, bunch of Apaches been stealin cattle. Eighteen ninetyaEU'five or six, somewheres in there. He may have killed some of em. He come back with her, she was just a little thing. She was wearin a dress made from an election poster and he took her and raised her as his own. He was just crazy about her. She died in a fire not long after that picture was took.

Did you know him?

I did. I worked for him at one time.

Did you ever kill a Indian?

No. I come near it a time or two. Some that worked for me. Who is that on the mule?

That's James Autry. He didnt care what he rode.

Who's that with the lion on the packhorse?

The old man shook his head. I know his name, he said. But I cant say it.

He drained his coffee and rose and got his cigarettes and an ashtray from the sideboard. The ashtray was from the Chicago World's Fair and it was cast from potmetal and it said 1833aEU'1933. It said A Century of Progress. Let's go in here, he said.

They went in the parlor. There was a paneled oak pumporgan against the wall where they passed through from the diningroom. A lace throw on top of it. A framed handtinted portrait of the old man's wife as a young woman.

That thing dont play, the old man said. Aint nobody to play it noway.

My grandmama used to play one, Billy said. In the church.

Women used to play music. Anymore you just turn on a victrola.

He bent and opened the stove door with the poker and poked the fire up and put another split log in and shut the door.

They sat and the old man told him stories about rawhiding cattle in Mexico as a young man and about Villa's raid on Columbus New Mexico in nineteen sixteen and about sheriffs posses tracking badmen down into the bootheel as they fled toward the border and about the drought and dieaEU'up of eightysix and trailing north the corriente cattle that they'd bought for next to nothing up out of that stricken ground across the high parched plains. Cattle so poor the old man said that at evening crossing before the sun where it burned upon the western desert shore you could all but see through them.

What do you aim to do? he said.

I dont know. Try and hire on somewheres I reckon.

We're about shut down here altogether.

Yessir. I wasnt askin.

This war, the old man said. There's no way to calculate what's to come.

No sir. I dont reckon there is.

The old man tried to get him to stay the night but he would not. They stood on the porch. It was cold and the prairie all about lay in a deep silence. The horse nickered at them from the gate.

You'd do just as well to start fresh in the mornin, the old man said.

I know it. I just need to get on.

Well.

I like ridin of a night anyways.

Yes, the old man said. I always did. You take care, son.

Yessir. I will. Thank you.

HE CAMPED THAT NIGHT on the broad Animas Plain and the wind blew in the grass and he slept on the ground wrapped in the serape and in the wool blanket the old man had given him. He built a small fire but he had little wood and the fire died in the night and he woke and watched the winter stars slip their hold and race to their deaths in the darkness. He could hear the horse step in its hobbles and hear the grass rip softly in the horse's mouth and hear it breathing or the toss of its tail and he saw far to the south beyond she Hatchet Mountains the flare of lightning over Mexico and he knew that he would not be buried in this valley but in some distant place among strangers and he looked out to where the grass was running in the wind under the cold starlight as if it were the earth itself hurtling headlong and he said softly before he slept again that the one thing he knew of all things claimed to be known was that there was no certainty to any of it. Not just the coming of war. Anything at all.

He went to work for the Hashknives except that it wasnt the Hashknives any more. They sent him out to a linecamp on the Little Colorado. In three months he saw three other human beings. When he got paid in March he went to the post office in Window and sent a money order to Mr Sanders for the twenty dollars he owed him and he went to a bar on First Street and sat on a stool and pushed back his hat with his thumb and ordered a beer.

What kind of beer you want? the barman said.

Just any kind. It dont matter.

You aint old enough to drink beer.

Then why did you ask me what kind I wanted?

It dont matter cause I aint servin you.

What kind is he drinkin?

The man down the bar that he'd nodded to studied him. This is a draft, son, he said. Just tell em you want a draft.

Yessir. Thank you.

Dont mention it.

He walked up the street and went in the next bar and sat on a stool. The barman wandered down and stood before him.

Give me a draft.

He went back down the bar and pulled the beer into a round glass mug and came back and set it on the bar. Billy put a dollar on the bar and the barman went to the cash register and rang it up and came back and clapped down seventyaEU'five cents.

Where you from? he said.

Down around Cloverdale. I been workin for the Hashknives. There aint no Hashknives. Babbitts sold it.

Yeah. I know it.

Sold it to a sheepherder.

Yeah.

What do you think of that?

I dont know.

Well I do.

Billy looked down the bar. It was empty save for a soldier who looked drunk. The soldier was watching him.

They never sold him the brand though, did they? the barman said.

No.

No. So there aint no Hashknives.

You want to flip for the jukebox? the soldier said.

Billy looked at him. No, he said. I wouldnt care to.

Set there then.

I aim to.

Is there somethin wrong with that beer, the barman said.

No. I dont reckon. Do you get a lot of complaints?

I just noticed you aint drinkin it is all.

Billy looked at the beer. He looked down the length of the bar. The soldier had turned slightly and was sitting with one hand on his knee. As if he might be deciding whether or not to get up.

I just thought there might be somethin wrong with it, the barman said.

Well I dont reckon there is, Billy said. But if there is I'll let you know.

You got a cigarette? the soldier said.

I dont smoke.

You dont smoke.

No.

The barman fished a pack of Lucky Strikes from his shirtpocket and palmed them onto the bar and slid them down to the soldier. There you go, soldier, he said.

Thanks, the soldier said. He shook a cigarette upright in the pack and pulled it free with his mouth and took a lighter fromhis pocket and lit the cigarette and put the lighter on the bar and slid the pack of cigarettes back to the barman. What's that in your pocket? he said.

Who are you talkin to? said Billy.

The soldier blew smoke down the bar. Talkin to you, he said.

Well, said Billy. I reckon its my business what I got in my pocket.

The soldier didnt answer. He sat smoking. The barman reached and got the cigarettes from the bar and took one and lit it and put the pack back in his shirtpocket. He stood leaning against the backbar with his arms crossed and the smoldering cigarette in his fingers. No one spoke. They seemed to be waiting for someone to arrive.

Do you know how old I am? the barman said.

Billy looked at him. No, he said. How would I know how old you are?

I'll be thirtyaEU'eight years old in June. June fourteenth.

Billy didnt answer.

That's how come I aint in uniform.

Billy looked at the soldier. The soldier sat smoking.

I tried to enlist, the barman said. Tried to lie about my age but they wasnt havin none of it.

He dont care, the soldier said. Uniform dont mean nothin to him.

The barman pulled on his cigarette and blew smoke toward the bar. I'll bet it'd mean somethin if it had that risin sun on the collar and they was comin down Second Street about ten abreast. I bet it'd mean somethin then.

Billy picked up the beermug and drank it dry and set it back on the bar and stood up and pulled his hat forward and looked a last time at the soldier and turned and went out into the street.

He worked another nine months for Aja and when he left he had a packhorse that he'd traded for and a regular bedroll and soogan and an old singleshot 32 caliber Stevens rifle. He rode south across the high plains west of Socorro and he rode through Magdalena and across the plains of Saint Augustine. When he rode into Silver City it was snowing and he checked into the Palace Hotel and sat in the room and watched the snow falling in the street. There was no one about. He went out after a while and walked down Bullard Street to the feed store but it was closed. He found a grocery store and bought six boxes of breakfast cereal and came back and fed them to the horses and put the horses in the yard behind the hotel and got his supper in the hotel diningroom and went up and went to bed. When he came down in the morning he was the only one at breakfast and when he went out to try and buy some clothes all the shops were closed. It was gray and cold in the streets and a mean wind blew out of the north and there was no one about. He tried the door of the drugstore because there was a light on inside but it was closed too. When he got back to the hotel he asked the clerk if today was Sunday and the clerk said it was Friday.

He looked out at the street. There aint no stores open, he said.

It's Christmas day, the clerk said. Aint no stores open on Christmas day.

He drifted into the north Texas panhandle and he worked out most of the following year for the Matadors and he worked for the T Diamond. He drifted south and he worked small spreads some no more than a week. By the spring of the third year of the war there was hardly a ranch house in all of that country that did not have a gold star in the window. He worked until March on a small ranch out of Magdalena New Mexico and then one day he got his pay and saddled his horse and tied his bedroll onto the packhorse and rode south again. He crossed the last blacktop highway just east of Steins and two days later rode up to the SK Bar gate. It was a cool spring day and the old man was sitting on the porch in his rocker with his hat on and a bible in his lap. He'd bent forward to see if he could tell who it was. As if the extra foot of proximity might bring the rider into focus. He looked older and more frail, much reduced from his former self in the two years since he'd seen him. Billy called his name and the old man said for him to get down and he did. When he got to the foot of the steps he stopped with one hand on the paintflaked baluster and looked up at the old man. The old man sat with the bible closed over one finger to mark its place. Is that you, Parham? he said.

Yessir. Billy.

He walked up the steps and took off his hat and shook hands with the old man. The old man's eyes had faded to a paler blue. He held Billy's hand a long time. Bless your heart, he said. I've thought about you a thousand times. Set down here where we can visit.

He pulled up one of the old canebottomed chairs and sat and put his hat over his knee and looked out over the pasturelands toward the mountains and he looked at the old man.

I reckon you knew about Miller, the old man said.

No sir. I've not had much news.

He was killed on Kwajalein Atoll.

I'm awful sorry to hear that.

We've had it pretty rough here. Pretty rough.

They sat. There was a breeze coming up the country. A pot of asparagus fern hanging from the porch eaves at the corner swung gently and its shadow oscillated over the boards of the porch slow and random and uncentered.

Are you doin all right? Billy said.

Oh I'm all right. I had a operation for cataracts back in the fall but I'm makin it. Leona went off and got married on me. Now her husband's shipped out and she's livin in Roswell I dont know what for. Got a job. I tried to reason with her but you know how that goes.

Yessir.

By rights I got no business bein here atall.

I hope you live forever.

Dont wish that on me.

He'd leaned back and closed the bible shut. That rain is comin this way, he said.

Yessir. I believe it is.

Can you smell it?

Yessir.

I always loved that smell.

They sat. After a while Billy said: Can you smell it?

No.

They sat.

What do you hear from that Boyd', the old man said.

I aint heard nothin. He never come back from Mexico. Or if he did I never heard it.

The old man didnt speak for a long time. He watched the darkening country to the south.

I seen it rain on a blacktop road in Arizona one time, he said. It rained on one side of the white line for a good half mile and the other side bone dry. Right down the centerline.

I can believe that, Billy said. I've seen it rain thataway.

It was a peculiar thing to see.

I seen it thunder in a snowstorm one time, Billy said. Thunder and lightnin. You couldnt see the lightnin. Just everthing would light up all around you, white as cotton.

I had a Mexican one time to tell me that, the old man said. I didnt know whether to believe him or not.

It was in Mexico was where I seen it.

Maybe they dont have it in this country.

Billy smiled. He crossed his boots on the boards of the porch in front of him and watched the country.

I like them boots, the old man said.

I bought em in Albuquerque.

They look to be good'ns.

I hope they are. I give enough for em.

Everthing's higher than a cat's back with the war and all. What all you can even find to buy.

Doves were coming in and crossing tie pasture toward the stockpond west of the house.

You aint got married on us have you? the old man said.

No sir.

People hate to see a man single. I dont know what there is about it. They used to pester me about gettin married again and I was near sixty when my wife died. My sister in law primarily. I'd done already had the best woman ever was. Aint nobody goin to be that lucky twice runnin.

No sir. Most likely not.

I remember old Uncle Bud Langford used to tell people, said: It would take one hell of a wife to beat no wife at all. Course then he was never married, neither. So I dont know how he would know.

I guess I've got to say that I dont understand the first thing about em.

What's that.

Women.

Well, said the old man. At least you aint took to lyin.

There wouldnt be no use in it.

Why dont you put your horses up fore your plunder gets wet out yonder.

I reckon I'd best be gettin on.

You aint goin to ride off in the rain. We're fixin to eat supper here in just a few minutes. I got a Mexican woman cooks for me.

Well. I probably need to move while the spirit's on me.

Just stay and take supper. Hell, you just got here.

When he came back from the barn the wind was blowing harder but it still had not begun to rain.

I remember that horse, the old man said. That was your daddy's horse.

Yessir.

He bought it off a Mexican. He claimed the horse when he bought it didnt know a word of english.

The old man pushed himself up from his rocker and clutched the bible under his arm. Even gettin up out of a chair gets to be work. You wouldnt believe that, would you?

Do you think horses understand what people say?

I aint sure most people do. Let's go in. She's done hollered twice.

He was up in the morning before daybreak and he went through the dark house to the kitchen where there was a light. The woman was sitting at the kitchen table listening to an old wooden radio shaped like a bishop's hat. She was listening to a station out of Ciudad Juarez and when he stood in the door she turned it off and looked at him.

Esta bien, he said. No tiene que apagarlo.

She shrugged and rose. She said that it was over anyway. She asked him if he would like his breakfast and he said that he would.

While she was fixing it he walked out to the barn and brushed the horses and cleaned their hooves and then saddled Nino and left the latigo loose and he strapped the old visalia packframe onto his bedhorse and tied on his soogan and went back to the house. She got his breakfast out of the oven and set it on the table. She'd cooked eggs and ham and flour tortillas and beans and she set it in front of him and poured his coffee.

Quiere crema, she said.

No gracias. Hay salsa?

She set the salsa at his elbow in a small lavastone molcajete.

Gracias.

He thought that she would leave but she didnt. She stood watching him eat.

Es pariente del senor Sanders? she said.

No. El era amigo de mi padre.

He looked up at her. Sientate, he said. Puede sentarse.

She made a little motion with her hand. He didnt know what it meant. She stood as before.

Su salud no es buena, he said.

She said that it was not. She said that he had had trouble with his eyes and that he was very sad over his nephew who was killed in the war. Conoc16 a su sobrino? she said.

Si. Y usted?

She said that she had not known the nephew. She said that when she came to work here the nephew was already dead. She said that she had seen his picture and that he was very handsome.

He ate the last of the eggs and wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate the tortilla and drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth and looked up and thanked her.

Tiene que hacer un viaje largo? she said.

He rose and put the napkin on the table and took his hat up from the other chair and put it on. He said that he did indeed have a long journey. He said he did not know what the end of his journey would look like or whether he would know it when he got there and he asked her in Spanish to pray for him but she said she had already decided to do so before he even asked.

* * *

HE SIGNED the horses through the Mexican customs at Berendo and folded the stamped entry papers into his saddlebag and gave the aduanero a silver dollar. The aduanero saluted him gravely and addressed him as caballero and he rode south into old Mexico, State of Chihuahua. He'd last passed through this port of entry seven years ago when he was thirteen and his father rode the horse he now rode and they had taken delivery of eight hundred head of cattle from two Americans rawhiding the back acres of an abandoned ranch in the mountains to the west of Ascension. At that time there had been a cafe here but now there was none. He rode down the little mud street and bought three tacos from a woman sitting beside a charcoal brazier in the dust of the roadside and ate them as he went.

Two days' riding brought him at evening to the town of Janos, or to the lights thereof sited on the darkening plain below him. He sat the horse in the old rutted wagonroad and looked off toward the western Sierras black against the bloodred drop of the sky. Beyond lay the Bavispe River country and the high Pilares with the snow still clinging in the northern rincons and the nights still cold up there on the alto piano where he had ridden another horse in another time long ago.

He approached from the east in the dark, riding past one of the crumbling mud towers of the ancient walled town and riding slowly through a settlement composed wholly of mud and in ruins a hundred years. He rode past the tall mud church and past the old green Spanish bells hung from their trestlepole in the yard and past the open doors of the houses where men sat smoking quietly. Behind them in the yellow light of the oil lamps the women moved at their tasks. Over the town hung a haze of charcoal smoke and from somewhere in those dusky warrens music was playing.

He followed the sound down the narrow mud corridors and hove up at last before a door nailed up out of raw pine boards crusted with dried rosin and hung on bullhide hinges. The room he entered was but one more in the row of cribs inhabited or abandoned that lined either side of the little street. When he entered the music ceased and the musicians turned and looked at him. There were several tables in the room and all had ornately turned legs that were stained with mud as if they'd stood outside in the rain. At one of the tables sat four men with glasses and a bottle. Along the back wall was an ornate Brunswick bar brought here from God knew where and on the shelves of the carved and dusty backbar there were half a dozen bottles, some with labels, some without.

Esta abierto? he said.

One of the men pushed back his chair on the clay floor and stood. He was very tall and when he stood his head vanished into the darkness above the single shaded bulb that hung over the table. Si, caballero, he said. Como no?

He went to the bar and took down an apron from a nail and tied it about his waist and stood before the dimly lit carved mahogany with his hands crossed before him. He looked like a butcher standing in a church. Billy nodded at the other three men at the table and wished them a good evening but none spoke back. The musicians rose with their instruments and filed out into the street.

He pushed his hat back slightly on his head and crossed the room and put his hands on the bar and studied the bottles on the back wall.

Deme un Waterfills y Frazier, he said.

The barman held up one finger. As if agreeing with the wisdom of this choice. He reached and took down a tumbler from among a varied collection and righted it on the bar and reached down the whiskey and poured the glass half full.

Agua? he said.

No gracias. Tome algo para usted.

The barman thanked him and reached down another tumbler and poured it and set the bottle on the bar. On the dust of the bottle his hand had left an imprint visible in the sallow glare from the lamp. Billy held up his glass and looked at the barman across the rim of it. Salud, he said.

Salud, said the barman. They drank. Billy set his glass down and gestured at it with a circling motion of his finger that included the barman's glass also. He turned and looked at the three men sitting on the table. Y sus amigos tambien, he said.

Bueno, said the barman. Como no.

He crossed the room in his apron with the bottle and poured their glasses and they toasted his health and he raised his own glass and they drank. The barman returned to the bar where he stood uncertainly, glass and bottle in hand. Billy set his glass on the bar. Finally a voice from the table spoke to ask that he join them. He picked up the glass and turned and thanked them. He did not know who had spoken.

When he pulled back the chair which the barman had earlier vacated and sat in it and looked up he could see that the oldest of the three men was very drunk. He wore a sweatstained guayabera and he slouched in his chair with his chin resting in the open collar of it. The black eyes in their redrimmed cups were sullen and depthless. Like lead slag poured into borings to seal away something virulent or predacious. In the slow shuttering of the lids an overlong interval. It was the younger man on his right who spoke. He said that it was a long distance between drinks of whiskey for a traveler in this country.

Billy nodded. He looked at the bottle standing on their table. It was slightly yellow, slightly misshapen. There was no stopper to it nor label and it held a thin lees of fluid, a thin sediment. A thinly curved agave worm. Tomamos mescal, the man said. He leaned back in his chair and called to the barman. Venga, he called. Sientate con nosotros.

The barman set the whiskey bottle on the bar but Billy said for him to bring it. He untied his apron and took it off and hung it back on the nail and came over with the bottle. Billy waved at the glasses on the table. Otra vez, he said.

Otra vez, said the barman. He poured the glasses round.

When he had filled all save the glass of the man who was drunk he hesitated for the prior pouring yet stood before him. The younger man touched his elbow. Alfonso, he said. Tome.

Alfonso drank not. He stared leadenly at the pale newcomer. He seemed not so much reduced by drink as restored to some atavistic state once lost to him. The younger man looked across the table at the American. Es un hombre muy serio, he said.

The barman stood the bottle before them and dragged a chair across from a nearby table and sat. All raised their glasses. They would have drunk except that Alfonso chose that moment to speak. Quien es, joven? he said.

They paused. They looked at Billy. Billy lifted his glass and drank and sat the empty glass down and looked across the table at those eyes again.

Un hombre, he said. No mas.

Americano.

Claro. Americano.

Es vaquero?

Si. Vaquero.

The drunk man did not move. His eyes did not move. He could have been speaking to himself.

Tome, Alfonso, said the younger man. He raised his own glass and looked around the table. The others raised their glasses. All drank.

Y usted? said Billy.

The drunk man did not answer. His wet red underlie hung loosely away from the perfect white teeth. He seemed not to have heard.

Es soldado? he said.

Soldado no.

The younger man said that the drunk man had been a soldier in the revolution and that he had fought at Torreon and at Zacatecas and that he had been wounded many times. Billy looked at the drunk man. The opaque black of his eyes. The younger man said that he had received three bullets in the chest at Zacatecas and lain in the dirt of the streets in darkness and cold while the dogs drank his blood. He said that the holes were there in the patriot's chest for all to see.

Otra vez, said Billy. The barman leaned forward with the bottle and poured.

When all the glasses were filled the younger man raised his glass and offered a toast to the revolution. They drank. They set their glasses down and wiped their mouths with the backs of their hands and looked at the drunk man. Por que viene aqui? the drunk man said.

They looked at Billy.

Aqui? said Billy.

But the drunk man did not respond to questions, he only asked them. The younger man leaned slightly forward. En este pais, he whispered.

En este pais, said Billy. They waited. He leaned forward and reached across the table and took the drunk man's glass of mescal and slung its contents out across the room and set the glass back on the table. No one moved. He gestured to the barman. Otra vez, he said.

The barman reached slowly for the bottle and slowly poured the glasses once again. He set the bottle down and wiped his hand on the knee of his trousers. Billy picked up his glass and held it before him. He said that he was in their country to find his brother. He said that his brother was a little crazy and he should not have abandoned him but he did.

They sat holding their glasses. They looked at the drunk man. Tome, Alfonso, said the younger man. He gestured with his glass. The barman raised his own glass and drank and set the empty glass on the table again and leaned back. Like a player who has moved his piece and sits back to await the results. He looked across the table at the youngest man who sat slightly apart with his hat down over his forehead and his full glass in both hands before him like an offering. Who'd so far said no word at all. The whole room had begun to hum very slightly.

The ends of all ceremony are but to avert bloodshed. But the drunk man by his condition inhabited a twilight state of responsibility and to this the man at his side made silent appeal. He smiled and shrugged and raised his glass to the norteamericano and drank. When he set his glass down again the drunk man stirred. He leaned slowly forward and reached for his glass and the younger man smiled and raised his glass again as if to welcome him back from his morbidities. But the drunk man clutched the glass and then slowly held it out to the side of the table and poured the whiskey on the floor and set the glass back upon the table once more. Then he reached unsteadily for the bottle of mescal and turned it up and poured the oily yellow fuel into his glass and set the bottle back on the table with the sediment and the worm coiling slowly clockwise in the glass floor of it. Then he leaned back as before.

The younger man looked at Billy. Outside in the darkened town a dog barked.

No le gusta el whiskey? Billy said.

The drunk man did not answer. The glass of mescal sat as it had sat when Billy first entered the bar.

Es el sello, said the younger man.

El sello?

Si.

He said that he objected to the seal which was the seal of an oppressive government. He said that he would not drink from such a bottle. That it was a matter of honor.

Billy looked at the drunk man.

Es mentira, the drunk man said.

Mentira? said Billy.

Si. Mentira.

Billy looked at the younger man. He asked him what it was that was a lie but the younger man told him not to preoccupy himself. Nada es mentira, he said.

No es cuest16n de ningun sello, the drunk man said.

He spoke slowly but not without facility. He had turned and addressed his statement to the younger man beside him. Then he turned back and continued to stare at Billy. Billy made a circle with his finger. Otra vez, he said. The barman reached and took up the bottle.

You want to drink that stinkin catpiss in favor of good american whiskey, Billy said, you be my guest.

Mande? said the drunk man.

The barman sat uncertainly. Then he leaned and poured the empty glasses and picked up the cork and pushed it back into the bottle. Billy raised his glass. Salud, he said. He drank. All drank. Save for the drunk man. Out in the street the old spanish bells rang once, rang twice. The drunk leaned forward. He reached past the glass of mescal standing before him and seized the bottle of mescal again. He picked it up and poured Billy's glass full with a slight circular movement of his hand. As if the small tumbler must be filled in some prescribed fashion. Then he tipped the bottle up and set it on the table and leaned back.

The barman and the two younger men sat holding their glasses. Billy sat looking at themescal. He leaned back in the chair. He looked toward the door. He could see Nino standing in the street. The musicians who had fled were already playing again somewhere in another street, another taverna. Or perhaps it was other musicians. He reached and took up the mescal and held it to the light. A smokelike sediment curled in the glass. Small bits of debris. No one moved. He tilted the glass and drank.

Salud, called the younger man. They drank. The barman drank. They clapped their empty tumblers on the table and they smiled around. Then Billy leaned to one side and spat the mescal in the floor.

In the ensuing silence the pueblo itself seemed to have been sucked up by the desert round. There was no sound anywhere. The drunk man sat stilled in the act of reaching for his glass. The younger man lowered his eyes. In the shadow of the lamp his eyes even looked closed and may have been. The drunk man balled his reaching hand and lowered it to the table. Billy circled one finger in the air slowly. Otra vez, he said.

The barman looked at Billy. He looked at the leadenaEU'eyed patriot sitting with his fist upright beside his glass. Era demasiado fuerte para el, he said. Demasiado fuerte.

Billy didnt take his eyes from the drunk man. Mas mentiras, he said. He said that it was not at all the case that the mescal was too strong for him as the barman claimed.

They sat looking at the mescal bottle. At the black half moon of the bottle's shadow beside the bottle. When the drunk man did not move or speak Billy reached across the table for the whiskey bottle and poured the glasses round once more and set the bottle back on the table. Then he pushed back his chair and stood.

The drunk man placed both hands on the edge of the table.

The man who had so far not spoken at all said in english that if he reached for his billfold the man would shoot him.

I dont doubt that for a minute, Billy said. He spoke to the bartender without taking his eyes from the man across the table. Cuanto debo? he said.

Cinco dolares? said the barman.

He reached into his shirtpocket with two fingers and took out his money and dealt it open with his thumb and slid loose a fivedollar bill and laid it on the table. He looked at the man who'd spoken to him in english. Will he shoot me in the back? he said.

The man looked up at him from under his hatbrim and smiled. No, he said. I dont think so.

Billy touched the brim of his hat and nodded to the men at the table. Caballeros, he said. And turned to start for the door leaving his filled glass on the table.

If he calls to you do not turn around, the young man said.

He did not stop and he did not turn and he'd very nearly reached the door when the man did call. Joven, he said.

He stopped. The horses out in the street raised their heads and looked at him. He looked at the distance to the door which was no more than his own length. Walk, he said. Just walk. But he didnt walk. He turned around.

The drunk man had not moved. He sat in his chair and the young man who spoke english had risen and stood beside him with one hand on his shoulder. They looked to be posed for some album of outlawry.

Me llama embustero? said the drunk man.

No, he said.

Embustero? He clawed at his shirt and ripped it open. It was fastened with snaps and it opened easily and with no sound. As if perhaps the snaps were worn and loose from just such demonstrations in the past. He sat holding his shirt wide open as if to invite again the trinity of rifleballs whose imprint lay upon his smooth and hairless chest just over his heart in so perfect an isoscelian stigmata. No one at the table moved. None looked at the patriot nor at his scars for they had seen it all before. They watched the guero where he stood framed in the door. They did not move and there was no sound and he listened for something in the town that would tell him that it was not also listening for he had a sense that some part of his arrival in this place was not only known but ordained and he listened for the musicians who had fled upon his even entering these premises and who themselves perhaps were listening to the silence from somewhere in those cratered mud precincts and he listened for any sound at all other than the dull thud of his heart dragging the blood through the small dark corridors of his corporeal life in its slow hydraulic tolling. He looked at the man who'd warned him not to turn but that was all the warning that man had. What he saw was that the only manifest artifact of the history of this negligible republic where he now seemed about to die that had the least authority or meaning or claim to substance was seated here before him in the sallow light of this cantina and all else from men's lips or from men's pens would require that it be beat out hot all over again upon the anvil of its own enactment before it could even qualify as a lie. Then it all passed. He took off his hat and stood. Then for better or for worse he put it on again and turned and walked out the door and untied the horses and mounted up and rode out down the narrow street leading the packhorse and he did not look back.

* * *

HE'D NOT GOT CLEAR of the town before a drop of rain the size of a middle taw landed in the brim of his hat. Then another. He looked up into a cloudless sky. The visible planets burning in the east. There was no wind nor smell of rain in the air yet the drops fell the more. The horse wanted to stop in the road and the rider looked back at the dark town. The few small window squares of dim and reddish light. The smack of the rain falling on the hard clay of the road sounded like horses somewhere in the darkness crossing a bridge. He was beginning to feel drunk. He halted the horse and then turned and rode back.

He rode the horse through the first door he came to, dropping the packhorse's rope and leaning low along his horse's neck to clear the doorbeam. Inside he sat the animal in the selfsame rain and he looked up to see the selfsame stars above him. He reined the horse about and rode out again and entered another doorway and at once the muted clatter of the raindrops on the crown of his hat ceased. He got down and stomped about in the dark to see what was underfoot. He went out and brought in the packhorse and untied the diamondhitch and pulled his soogan off onto the ground and unbuckled and pulled down the packframe and hobbled the animal and drove it back out into the rain. Then he pulled loose the latigo on his saddlehorse and pulled off the saddle and saddlebags and stood the saddle against the wall and knelt down and felt out the ropes on the soogan and untied and unrolled it and sat and pulled off his boots. He was feeling drunker. He took off his hat and lay down. The horse walked past his head and stood looking out the door. Dont you step on me damn you, he said.

When he woke in the morning the rain had stopped and it was full daylight. He felt awful. He'd risen sometime in the night and staggered out to vomit and he remembered casting about with his weeping eyes for some sign of the horses and then staggering in again. He might not have remembered it except that when he sat up and looked around for his boots they were on his feet. He picked up his hat and put it on and looked toward the door. Several children who had been crouched there watching him stood up and backed away.

Donde estan los caballos? he said.

They said that the horses were eating.

He stood too fast and leaned against the doorjamb holding his eves. He was afire with thirst. He raised his head again and stepped out through the door and looked at the children. They were pointing down the road.

He walked out past the last of the row of low mud dwellings with the children following behind and walked the horses down in a grassy field on the south side of the town where a small stream crossed the road. He stood holding Nino's reins. The children watched.

Quieres montar, he said.

They looked at one another. The youngest was a boy of about five and he held both arms straight up in the air and stood waiting. Billy picked him up and set him astride the horse and then the little girl and lastly the oldest boy. He told the oldest boy to hold on to the younger ones and the boy nodded and he picked up the reins again and the packhorse's trailing rope and led both horses back up toward the road.

A woman was coming along from the town. When the children saw her they whispered among themselves. She was carrying a blue pail with a cloth over it. She stood by the side of the road holding the pail by the bailwire in both hands before her. Then she started down through the field towards them.

Billy touched his hat and wished her a good morning. She stopped and stood holding the pail. She said that she had been looking for him. She said that she knew he'd not gone far because his bed and his saddle were where he'd left them. She said that the children had told her that there was a horseman asleep in the caidas at the edge of town who was sick and she had brought him some menudo hot from the fire and if he would eat it he would then have strength for his journey.

She bent and set the pail on the ground and lifted away the cloth and handed the cloth to him. He stood holding it and looking down at the pail. Inside sat a bowl of speckled tinware covered with a saucer and beside the bowl were wedged some folded tortillas. He looked at her.

Andale, she said. She gestured toward the pail.

Y usted?

Ya comi.

He looked at the children aligned upon the horse's back. He handed up the reins and the catchrope to the boy.

Toma un paseo, he said.

The boy reached forward and took the reins and he handed the end of the catchrope to the girl and then handed the half rein over the girl's head and booted the horse forward. Billy looked at the woman. Es muy amable, he said. She said for him to eat before it grew cold.

He squatted on the ground and tried to lift out the bowl but it was too hot. Con permiso, she said. She reached down and took the bowl from the pail and lifted off the saucer and set the bowl in the saucer and handed it to him. Then she reached down and took out a spoon and handed him that.

Gracias, he said.

She knelt in the grass opposite to watch him eat. The ribbons of tripe swam in the clear and oily broth like slow planarians. He said that he was not really sick but only somewhat crudo from his night in the tavern. She said that she understood and that it was of no consequence and that sickness had no way to know who'd caused it thanks be to God for all of us.

He took a tortilla from the pail and tore it and refolded it and dipped it in the broth. He spooned up a piece of tripe and it sloughed from the spoon and he cut it in two against the side of the bowl with the edge of the spoon. The menudo was hot and rich with spice. He ate. She watched.

The children rode up on the horse behind him and sat waiting. He looked up at them and made a circling motion with his finger and they set off again. He looked at the woman.

Son suyos?

She shook her head. She said that they were not.

He nodded. He watched them go. The bowl had cooled somewhat and he took it by the rim and tipped it up and drank from it and took a bite of the tortilla. Muy sabroso, he said.

She said that she had had a son but that he was dead twenty years.

He looked at her. He thought that she did not look old enough to have had a child twenty years ago but then she seemed no particular age at all. He said that she must have been very young and she said that she had indeed been very young but that the grief of the young is greatly undervalued. She put one hand to her chest. She said that the child lived in her soul.

He looked out across the field. The children sat astride the horse at the edge of the river and the boy seemed to be waiting for the horse to drink. The horse stood waiting for whatever next thing might be required of it. He drained the last of the menudo and folded the last quadrant of the tortilla and wiped the bowl with it and ate it and set bowl and spoon and saucer back in the bucket and looked at the woman.

Cuanto le debo, senora, he said.

Senorita, she said. Nada.

He took the folded bills from his shirtpocket. Para los ninos. Ninos no tengo.

Para los nietos.

She laughed and shook her head. Nietos tampoco, she said. He sat holding the money.

Es para el camino, she said.

Bueno. Gracias.

Deme su mano.

Como?

Su mano.

He gave her his hand and she took it and turned it palm up and held it in hers and studied it.

Cuantos anos tiene? she said.

He said that he was twenty.

Tan joven. She traced his palm with the tip of her finger. She pursed her lips. Hay ladrones aqui, she said.

En mi palma?

She leaned back and closed her eyes and laughed. She laughed with an easy enthusiasm. Me lleva Judas, she said. No. She shook her head. She had on only a thin flowered shift and her breasts swung inside the cloth. Her teeth were white and perfect. Her legs bare and brown.

Donde pues? he said.

She caught her lower lip with her teeth and studied him with her dark eyes. Aqui, she said. En este pueblo.

Hay ladrones en todos lados, he said.

She shook her head. She said that in Mexico there were villages where robbers lived and villages where they did not. She said that it was a reasonable arrangement.

He asked her if she was a robber and she laughed again. Ay, she said. Dios mio, que hombre. She looked at him. Quizas, she said.

He asked her what sorts of things she would steal if she were a robber but she only smiled and turned his hand in hers and studied it.

Que ve, he said.

El mundo.

El mundo?

El mundo segun usted.

Es gitana^,

Quizas si. Quizas no.

She placed her other hand over his. She looked out across the field where the children were riding.

Que vio? he said.

Nada. No vi nada.

Es mentira.

Si.

He asked her why she would not tell what she had seen but she only smiled and shook her head. He asked if there were no good news at all and she became more serious and nodded yes and she turned his palm up again. She said that he would live a long life. She traced the line where it circled under the base of his thumb.

Con mucha tristeza, he said.

Bastante, she said. She said that there was no life without sadness.

Pero usted ha visto algo malo, he said. Que es?

She said that whatever she had seen could not be helped be it good or bad and that he would come to know it all in God's good time. She studied him with her head slightly cocked. As if there were some question he must ask if only he were quick enough to ask it but he did not know what it was and the moment was fast passing.

Que novedades tiene de mi hermano, he said.

Cual hermano?

He smiled. He said that he had but one brother.

She uncovered his hand and held it. She did not look at it. Es mentira, she said. Tiene dos.

He shook his head.

Mentira tras mentira, she said. She bent to study his palm. Que ve? he said.

Veo dos hermanos. Uno ha muerto.

He said that he had a sister who had died but she shook her head. Hermano, she said. Uno que vive, uno que ha muerto.

Cual es cual?

No sabes?

No.

Ni yo tampoco.

She let go his hand and rose and took up the bucket. She looked again across the field at the children and the horse. She said that he had perhaps been fortunate in the night for the rain may have kept those indoors who might otherwise have been abroad but she said that the rain which befriends can also betray one. She said also that while the rain fell by the will of God evil chose its own hour and that those whom it sought out were perhaps not entirely lacking of some certain darkness in themselves. She said that the heart betrayed itself and the wicked often had eyes to see that which was hidden from the good.

Y sus Ojos?

She tossed her head, her black hair flowed about her shoulders. She said that she had seen nothing. She said that it was only a game. Then she turned and walked across the field and up toward the road.

He rode south all day and in the evening he passed through the town of Casas Grandes and set out south along the road that he'd first ridden with his brother three years before, out past the darkening ruins in the dusk, past the ancient ballcourts where the nighthawks were hunting yet. The day following he reached the hacienda at San Diego and sat the horse in the old cottonwoods by the river. Then he rode the horse across the board bridge and up to the domicilios.

The Munoz house stood empty. He walked through the rooms. There were no furnishings of any kind. In the niche where the Virgin had stood nothing but a gray scale of old candlewax pooled on the dusty plaster.

He stood in the door, then he walked out and mounted up and rode up to the compound and through the gates.

In the courtyard an old man who sat weaving baskets told him that they were gone. He asked the old man if he knew where they had gone but the old man seemed not to have a clear understanding of the idea of destination. He gestured widely at the world. The rider sat the horse and looked about the courtyard. The old touring car. The ruining buildings. A hen turkey roosting in a sashless window. The old man had bent again to his basket and he wished him a good day and turned the horse and leading the packhorse rode out through the tall arched gate and past the tenants' quarters and down the hill to the river and across the bridge again.

Two days later he rode through Las Varas and turned east toward La Boquilla on the road where he and his brother had first seen their father's horse come up from the lake into the road wet and dripping. There'd been no rain in the high country and the road was dusty underfoot. A dry wind blowing down from the north. On the distant plain beyond the lake the dust blowing out of Babicora as if it were afire. In the evening the big red Waco plane came in from the west and circled and dropped among the trees.

He camped on the plain and made a small fire that seethed in the wind like a forgefire and swallowed up his meager hoard of sticks and limbs. He watched it burn and watched it burn. The rags of flame that fled downcountry broke and vanished like a shout in the darkness. The next day he rode through Babicora and Santa Ana de Babicora and took the road north to Namiquipa.

The town was little more than a mining camp sited on a bluff above the river and he staked his horses below the town to the east in a grove of river willows and bathed in the river and washed his clothes. In the morning when he rode up into the town he encountered a wedding party coming along the road. A common wood carreta hung with bunting. A tarp of manta tied over a rickety bowframe of willow poles to keep the bride from the sun. The cart was drawn by a single small mule, gray and shambling, the bride sat alone in the cart holding a parasol open beneath the teetering canopy. In the road beside her walked a company of men in suits of black or suits of gray that had perhaps once been black and as they passed the bride turned and looked at him sitting the horse by the roadside like some pale witness of ill omen and she blessed herself and turned away again and they went on. He would see the cart again in the village. The wedding was not till after noon and they had ridden in so early solely to take advantage of the dustless condition of the road at that hour.

He followed them down into the town and he rode his horse through the small dusty streets. No one was about. He leaned from his horse and rapped at a random door and sat listening. No one came. He shucked his boot backwards out of the stirrup and kicked at the door by way of knocking louder but the door was imperfectly latched and it swung slowly open into the low darkness.

Hola, he called.

No one answered. He looked out down the narrow street. He looked in through the top of the door. Against the far wall of the hovel a candle burned in a dish and lying on a trestle with wildflowers from the mountains about him lay an old man dressed in his burial suit.

He got down and dropped the reins and stepped through the low door and doffed his hat. The old man had his hands composed upon his chest and he had no shoes on and his bare feet had been tied together at the toes with twine so that they would not lie asplay. Billy called softly into the darkness of the house but that room was all the house there was. Four empty chairs stood against one wall. A fine dust lay over everything. High in the rear wall was one small window and he crossed the room and looked out into the patio behind the house. An old horsedrawn hearse stood with the wagonshafts tilted back against the box. In an open shed at the far side of the enclosure stood a raw wood coffin on sawhorses made from pine poles. The lid of the coffin leaned against the wall of the shed. The coffin and the lid had been blacked on the outside but the inside of the box was raw new wood and no cloth or any lining to it.

He turned and looked at the old man on his coolingboard. The old man had a moustache and his moustache and his hair were silver gray. The hands crossed at his chest were broad and sturdy. His nails had not been cleaned. His skin was dark and dusty, his bare feet square and knotty. The suit he wore seemed small for him and was of a cut no longer seen even in that country and the old man had most likely had it all his life.

He picked up a small yellow flower in shape like a daisy and which he'd seen grow by the roadside and he looked at the flower and at the old man. In the room the smell of wax, a faint hint of rot. A frail afterscent of burnt copal. Que novedades ahora viejo? he said. He put the flower in the buttonhole of his shirtpocket and went out and pulled the door shut behind him.

NONE IN THAT TOWN knew what had become of the girl. Her mother had moved away. Her sister had gone to Mexico years since, who knew what happened to such girls In the afternoon the wedding party came up the street with the bride and groom sitting on the box of the covered carreta. They passed slowly, accompanied by drum and cornet, the cart creaking, the bride in her veil of white, the groom in black. Their smiles like grimaces, terror in their eyes. In appearance they were like certain folk figures of that country who dance together with their own pale bones painted on their costumes. The cart in its slow creaking like that which fords the dreams of the paisano in his weary sleep, passing slowly from left to right through the irrestorable night for which alone he labors, dying away toward the dawn in a faint rattle, a tenuous dread.

In the evening they carried the old man up from the deadhouse and interred him in the cemetery among the tilted weathered boards that passed for tombstones in that austere upland country. No one questioned the right of the guero to be among the mourners and he nodded silently to them and entered the low house where a table had been laid with much of the best that the country had to offer. While he was standing against the wall eating tamales a woman came up to him and said to him that the girl would not be so easy to find as she was a notorious bandida and that many people were looking for her. She said it was rumored that at La Babicora they had put a price on her head. She said that some believed that the girl made gifts of silver and jewels to the poor and others believed that she was a witch or demon. It was also possible that the girl was dead although it was certainly not true that she had been killed at Ignacio Zaragosa.

He studied her. She was just a young woman of the campo.

Dressed in a poor black shift of cotton imperfectly mordant, imperfectly dyed. The blacking of it had left dark rings at her wrists.

Y Por que me dice esto pues? he said.

She stood with her upper lip in her lower teeth. Finally she said that it was because she knew who he was.

Y quien soy? he said.

She said that he was the brother of the guerito.

He lowered his foot from the wall behind him and looked at her and he looked beyond her at the dark mourners who filed past and foraged from the board like those same figures of death at the feast and he looked at her again. He asked her if she knew where he could find his brother.

She didnt answer. The movement of figures in the room slowed, the low mutterings of the condolent died to a whisper. The mourners wished one another that they profit from their meal and then all of it ground away in the history of its own repetition and he could hear those antecedent ceremonies dropping somewhere like wooden blocks into their slots. Like tumblers in a lock or like the wooden gearteeth in old machinery slipping one by one into the mortices cut in the cogwheel rolling up to meet them. No Babe? she said.

No.

She put her hand forefinger first against her mouth. Almost in such a gesture as to admonish one to silence. She held her hand out as if she might touch him. She said that his brother's bones lay in the cemetery at San Buenaventura.

It was dark when he went out and untied the horse and mounted up. He rode out past the sallow waxen windowlights and took the road south the way he'd come. Beyond the first rise the town vanished behind him and the stars swarmed everywhere in the blackness overhead and there was no sound at all in the night save the steady clop of the hooves in the road, the faint creak of leather, the breath of the horses.

He rode that country for weeks making inquiry of anyone willing to be inquired of. In a bodega in the mountain town of Temosachic he first heard lines from that corrido in which the young guero comes down from the north. Pelo tan rubio. Pistola en mano. Que buscas joven? Que to levantas tan temprano. He asked the corridero who was this joven of which he sang but he only said that it was a youth who sought justice as the song told and that he had been dead many years. The corridero held the fretted neck of his instrument with one hand and raised his glass from the table and toasted silently his inquisitor and toasted aloud the memory of all just men in the world for as it was sung in the corrido theirs was a bloodfilled road and the deeds of their lives were writ in that blood which was the world's heart's blood and he said that serious men sang their song and their song only.

Late April in the town of Madera he stabled his horse and went afoot through a fair in the field beyond the railtracks. It was cold in that mountain town and the air was filled with the smoke of pinon wood and the smell of pitch from the sawmill. In the field the lights were strung overhead and barkers called out their nostrums or called out the wonders hid within the shabby stenciled pitchtents staked with guyropes in the trampled grass. He bought a cup of cider from a vendor and watched the faces of the townsfolk, the faces dark and serious, the black eyes that seemed on the point of ignition beneath the feria lights. The girls that passed holding hands. The naive boldness of their glances. He stood before a painted caravan where a man in a red and gilded pulpit chanted to a gathering of men. A wheel with the figures from the loteria was fastened to the wall of the caravan and a girl in a red sheath and a black and silver bolero jacket stood on a wood platform ready to turn the wheel. The man in the pulpit turned to the girl and held out his cane and the girl smiled and pulled down on the side of the wheel and set it clacking. All faces turned to watch. The nails in the rim of the wheel went ratcheting over the leather pawl and the wheel slowed and came to a stop and the woman turned to the crowd and smiled. The pitchman held up his cane again and named the fading figure on the wheel whose turn had come.

La sirena, he cried.

No one moved.

Alguien?

He surveyed the crowd. They stood within a makeshift cuadra of rope. He held the cane out over them as if to ordain them into some sort of collective. The cane was black enamel and the silver head of it was in the form of a bust that may have been a likeness of the pitchman himself.

Otra vez, he cried.

His eyes swept over them. They swept over Billy where he stood alone at the edge of the crowd and they swept back. The wheel clacked and spun on its slightly eccentric track, the figures wheeled into a blur. The leather stop chattered.

A small toothless man sidled up to him and tugged at his shirt. He fanned before him the deck of cards. On the backs a pattern of arcane symbols woven into a damascene. Tome, he said. Pronto, pronto.

Cuanto?

Esta fibre. Tome.

He took a peso coin from his pocket and tried to hand it to the man but the man shook his head. He looked toward the wheel. The wheel slapped slowly.

Nada, nada, he said. Tenga prisa.

The wheel slapped, slapped. He took a card.

Espere, cried the pitchman. Espere…

The wheel turned a last soft click and stopped.

La calavera, cried the pitchman.

He turned over his card. Printed on it was the calavera.

Alguien? cried the pitchman. In the crowd they looked from one to the other.

The small man at his side seized his elbow. Lo tiene, he hissed. Lo tiene.

Que gano?

The man shook his head impatiently. He tried to hold up his hand that held the card. He said that he would get to see.

Ver que?

Adentro, hissed the man. Adentro. He reached and snatched the card from his grip and held it aloft. Aqui, he called. Aqui tenemos la calavera.

The pitchman swept his cane in a slow acceleration over the heads of the crowd and then suddenly pointed the silver cap toward Billy and the shill.

Tenemos ganador, he cried. Adelante, adelante.

Venga, wheezed the shill. He tugged at Billy's elbow. But Billy had already seen bleeding through the garish paintwork old lettering from a prior life and he recognized the caravan of the traveling opera company that he'd seen standing with its gilded wheelspokes in the smoky courtyard of the hacienda at San Diego when he and Boyd had first ridden through the gates there in that long ago and the caravan he'd seen stranded by the roadside while the beautiful diva sat beneath her awning and waited for men and horses to return who would not return ever. He pushed the shill's hand from his sleeve. No quiero ver, he said.

Si, si, slurred the shill. Es un espectaculo. Nunca ha visto nada como esto.

He seized the shill's thin wrist and held it. Olga, hombre, he said. No quiero verlo, me entiende?

The shill shrank in his grip, he cast a despairing look back over his shoulder toward the pitchman who stood waiting with his cane resting across the rostrum before him. All had turned to see the winner at the outermost reach of the lights. The woman by the wheel stood coquettishly, her forefinger twisted into the dimple in her cheek. The pitchman raised his cane and made with it a sweeping motion. Adelante, he cried. Que paso?

He pushed the shill from him and released his wrist but the shill far from being cast down only crept to his side and plucking with small motions of his fingers at his clothes began to whisper at his ear of the attractions of the spectacle within the caravan. The pitchman called out to him again. He said that everyone was waiting. But Billy had already turned to go and the pitchman called after him a last time and made some comment to the crowd which set them laughing and trying to see over their shoulders. The shill stood forlornly with the barata in his hands but the pitchman said that there would be no third assay with the wheel but rather the woman who turned the wheel would make a selection herself as to who should enter free. She smiled and scanned the faces with her painted eyes and pointed out a young boy at the forefront of the crowd but the pitchman said that he was too young and that it would not he permitted and the woman made a pout and said that all the same he was muy guapo and then she selected a brownskinned peon who stood stiffly before her in what may have been rented clothes and came down the steps and took him by the hand and the pitchman held up a roll of tickets in his fist and the men pressed forward to purchase them.

He walked out beyond the strung lights and crossed the field to where he'd left his horse and he paid the establero and led Nino clear of the other animals and mounted up. He looked back at the haze of the carnival lights burning in the crisp and smoky air and then rode out across the railtracks and took the road south out of Madera toward Temosachic.

A week later he rode again through Babicora in the early morning dark. Cool and quiet. No dogs. The hoofclop of the horses. The blue moonshadow of the horses and the rider passing slant along the street in a constant headlong falling. The road north had been freshly graded with a fresno and he rode along the selvedge through the soft dirt of the endspill. Dark junipers out on the plain islanded in the dawn. Dark cattle. A white sun rising.

He watered the horses at a grassy cienega where ancient cottonwoods stood in an elfin round and rolled himself into his soogan and slept. When he woke a man was sitting a horse watching him. He sat up. The man smiled. Te conozco, he said.

Billy reached and got his hat and put it on. Yeah, he said. And I know you.

Mande?

Donde esta su companero?

The man lifted one hand from the pommel in a vague gesture. Se murio, he said. Donde esta la muchacha?

Lo mismo.

The man smiled. He said that God's ways were strange ones.

Tiene razon.

Y su hermano'

No se. Muerto tambien, tal vez.

Tantos, said the man.

Billy looked toward where the horses were grazing. He'd been sleeping with his head on the mochila where his pistol was buckled away. The man's eyes followed his where they looked. He said for every man that death selects another is reprieved and he smiled in a conspiratorial manner. As one met with another of his kind. He leaned forward with his hands squared on the pommel of his saddle and spat.

Que piensa? he said.

Billy wasnt sure what it was that he was being asked. He said men die.

The man sat his horse and weighed this soberly. As if there might be some deeper substrate to this reflection with which he must reckon. He said that men believe death's elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destinv. He said that moreover it could not be otherwise that men's ends are dictated at their birth and that they will seek their deaths in the face of every obstacle. He said that both views were one view and that while men may meet with death in strange and obscure places which they might well have avoided it was mire correct to say that no matter how hidden or crooked the path to their destruction yet they would seek it out. He smiled. He spoke as one who seemed to understand that death was the condition of existence and life but an emanation thereof.

Que piensa usted? he said. Billy said that he had no opinion beyond the one he'd given. He said that whether a man's life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it. He said that while it was true that men shape their own lives it was also true that they could have no shape other for what then would that shape be?

Bien dicho, the man said. He looked across the country. He said that he could read men's thoughts. Billy didnt point out to him that he'd already asked him twice for his. He asked the man could he tell what he was thinking now but the man only said that their thoughts were one and the same. Then he said he harbored no grudge toward any man over a woman for they were only property afoot to be confiscated and that it was no more than a game and not to be taken seriously by real men. He said that he had no very high opinion of men who killed over whores. In any case, he said, the bitch was dead, the world rolled on.

He smiled again. He had something in his mouth and he rolled it to one side and sucked at his teeth and rolled it back. He touched his hat.

Bueno, he said. El camino espera.

He touched his hat again and roweled the horse and sawed it around until its eyes rolled and it squatted and stamped and then went trotting out through the trees and into the road where it soon disappeared from sight. Billy unbuckled the mochila and took out the pistol and thumbed open the gate and turned the cylinder and checked the chambers and then lowered the hammer with his thumb and sat for a long time listening and waiting.

On the fifteenth of May by the first newspaper he'd seen in seven weeks he rode again into Casas Grandes and stabled his horse and took a room at the Camino Recto Hotel. He rose in the morning and walked down the tiled hallway to the bath. When he came back he stood in the window where the morning light fell slant upon the raw cords in the worn carpet underfoot and listened to a girl singing in the garden below. She was sitting on a cloth of white canvas and piled on the canvas were nueces or pecans some bushels in quantity. She sat with a flat stone in the crook of her knees and she was breaking the pecans with a stone mano and as she worked she sang. Leaning forward with her dark hair veiled about her hands she worked and sang. She sang:

Pueblo de Bachiniva

Abril era el mes

Jinetes armados

Llegaron los seis

She crushed the hulls between the stones, she separated out the meats and dropped them in a jar at her side.

Si tenia miedo

No se le veia en su cara

Cuantos vayan llegando

El guerito les espera

Splitting out with her fineboned fingers the meat from the hulls, the delicate fissured hemispheres in which is writ we must believe each feature of the tree which bore them, each feature of the tree they'd come to bear. Then she sang the same two verses over. He buttoned his shirt and got his hat and went down the stairs and out into the courtyard. When she saw him coming across the cobbles she stopped singing. He touched his hat and wished her a good day. She looked up and smiled. She was a girl of perhaps sixteen. She was very beautiful. He asked her if she knew any more verses of the corrido which she sang but she did not. She said that it was an old corrido. She said that it was very sad and that at the end the guerito and his novia die in each other's arms for they have no more ammunition. She said that at the end the patron's men ride away and the people come from the town and carry the guerito and his novia to a secret place and bury them there and the little birds flew away but that she did not remember all the words and anyway she was embarrassed that he had been listening to her sing. He smiled. He told her that she had a pretty voice and she turned away and clucked her tongue.

He stood looking out across the courtyard toward the mountains to the west. The girl watched him.

Deme su mano, she said.

Mande?

Deme su mano. She held out her own hand in a fist before her. He squatted on his bootheels and held out his hand and she gave him a handful of the shelled pecans and then closed his hand with hers and looked about as if it were some secret gift and someone might see. Andale pues, she said. He thanked her and stood and walked back across the courtyard and up to his room but when he looked from the window again she was gone.

Days to come he rode up through the high country of the Babicora. He'd build his fire in some sheltered swale and at night sometimes he'd walk out over the grasslands and lie on the ground in the world's silence and study the burning firmament above him. Walking back to the fire those nights he often thought about Boyd, thought of him sitting by night at just such a fire in just such country. The fire in the bajada no more than a glow, hid in the ground like some secret glimpse of the earth's burning core broke through into the darkness. He seemed to himself a person with no prior life. As if he had died in some way years ago and was ever after some other being who had no history, who had no ponderable life to come.

He saw in his riding occasional parties of vaqueros crossing the high grasslands, sometimes mounted on mules for their good footing in the mountains, sometimes driving beeves before them. It was cold in the mountains at night but they seemed thinly dressed and had only their serapes in which to sleep. They were called mascarenas for the whitefaced cattle bred on the Babicora and they were called agringados because they worked for the white man. They crossed in silent defile over the talus slopes and rode up through the passes toward the high grassy vegas, sitting their horses with their easy formality, the low sun catching the tin cups tied to their saddlehorns. He saw their fires burning on the mountain at night but never did he go to them.

On a certain evening just before dark he entered into a road and turned and followed it west. The red sun that burned in the broad gap of the mountains before him sloughed out of its form and was slowly sucked away to light all the sky in a deep red afterflash. When darkness had come there stood in the distance on the plain the single yellow light from a dwelling and he rode on until he came to a small weatherboard cabin and sat the horse before it and called out.

A man came to the door and stepped out onto the gallery. Quien es? he said.

Un viajero.

Cuantos son ustedes?

Yo solo.

Bueno, the man said. Desmonte. Pasale.

He stepped down and tied the bridlereins about the porch post and mounted the steps and removed his hat. The man held the door for him and he entered and the man followed and shut the door and nodded toward the fire.

They sat and drank coffee. The man's name was Quijada and he was a Yaqui Indian from western Sonora and he was the same gerente of the Nahuerichic division of the Babicora who'd told Boyd to cut their horses out of the remuda and take them. He'd seen the lone guero riding in the mountains and told the alguacil not to molest him. He told his guest that he knew who he was and why he'd come. Then he leaned back in his chair. He raised the cup to his lips and drank and watched the fire.

You're the man give us back our horses, Billy said.

He nodded. He leaned forward and he looked at Billy and then he sat looking into the fire. The thick handleless porcelain cup from which he drank looked like a chemist's mortar and he sat with his elbows on his knees and held it before him in both hands and Billy thought that he would say something more but he did not. Billy drank from his cup and sat holding it. The fire ticked. Outside in the world all was silence. Is my brother dead? he said.

Yes.

He was killed in Ignacio Zaragosa?

No. In San Lorenzo.

The girl too?

No. When they took her away she was covered in blood and she was falling down and so it was natural that people thought that she had been shot but it was not so.

What became of her?

I dont know. Perhaps she went back to her family. She was very young.

I asked about her in Namiquipa. They didnt know what had become of her.

They would not tell you in Namiquipa.

Where is my brother buried?

He is buried at Buenaventura.

Is there a stone?

There is a board. He was very popular with the people. He was a popular figure.

He didnt kill the manco in La Boquilla.

I know.

I was there.

Yes. He killed two men in Galeana. No one knows why. They did not even work for the latifundio. But the brother of one was a friend to Pedro Lopez.

The alguacil.

The alguacil. Yes.

He'd seen him once in the mountains, he and his henchmen, the three of them descending a ridgeline in the twilight. The alguacil carried a short sword in a beltscabbard and he answered to no one. Quijada leaned back and sat with his boots crossed before him. The cup in his lap. Both watched the fire. As if some work were there annealing. Quijada raised his cup as if to drink. Then he lowered it again.

There is the latifundio of Babicora, he said. With all the wealth and power of Mr Hearst to call upon. And there are the campesinos in their rags. Which do you believe will prevail?

I dont know.

His days are numbered.

Mr Hearst?

Yes.

Why do you work for the Babicora?

Because they pay me.

Who was Socorro Rivera?

Quijada tapped the rim of his cup softly with the gold band on his finger. Socorro Rivera tried to organize the workers against the latifundio. He was killed at the paraje of Las Varitas by the Guardias Blancas five years ago along with two other men. Crecencio Macias and Manuel Jimenez.

Billy nodded.

The soul of Mexico is very old, said Quijada. Whoever claims to know it is either a liar or a fool. Or both. Now that the yankees have again betrayed them the Mexicans are eager to reclaim their Indian blood. But we do not want them. Most particularly the Yaqui. The Yaqui have long memories.

I believe you. Did you ever see my brother again after we left with the horses?

No.

How do you know about him?

He was a hunted man. Where would you go? Inevitably he was taken in by Casares. You go to the enemy of your enemies.

He was only fifteen. Sixteen, I guess.

All the better.

They didnt take very good care of him, did they?

He didnt want to be taken care of. He wanted to shoot people. What makes one a good enemy also makes one a good friend.

Yet you work for Mr Hearst?

Yes.

He turned and looked at Billy. I am not a Mexican, he said. I dont have these loyalties. These obligations. I have others.

Would you have shot him yourself?

Your brother?

Yes.

If it had come to that. Yes.

Maybe I ought not to be drinkin your coffee.

Maybe not.

They sat for a long time. Finally Quijada leaned forward and studied his cup. He should have gone home, he said.

Yes.

Why didnt he?

I dont know. Maybe the girl.

The girl would not have gone with him?

I suppose she would have. He didnt rightly have a home to go to.

Maybe you are the one who should have cared for him better. He wasnt easy to care for. You said it yourself.

Yes.

What does the corrido say?

Quijada shook his head. The corrido tells all and it tells nothing. I heard the tale of the guerito years ago. Before your 'brother was even born.

You dont think it tells about him?

Yes, it tells about him. It tells what it wishes to tell. It tells what makes the story run. The corrido is the poor man's history. It does not owe its allegiance to the truths of history but to the truths of men. It tells the tale of that solitary man who is all men. It believes that where two men meet one of two things can occur and nothing else. In the one case a lie is born and in the other death.

That sounds like death is the truth.

Yes. It sounds like death is the truth. He looked at Billy. Even if the guerito in the song is your brother he is no longer your brother. He cannot be reclaimed.

I aim to take him back with me.

It will not be permitted.

Who would I go to?

There is no one to go to.

Who would I go to if there was someone?

You could apply to God. Otherwise there is no one.

Billy shook his head. He sat regarding his own dark visage where it yawed in the white ring of the cup. After a while he looked up. He looked into the fire. Do you believe in God? he said.

Quijada shrugged. On godly days, he said.

No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they? No.

It's never like what you expected.

Quijada nodded. If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them? People speak about what is in store. But there is nothing in store. The day is made of what has come before. The world itself must be surprised at the shape of that which appears. Perhaps even God.

We come down here to get our horses. Me and my brother. I dont think he even cared about the horses, but I was too dumb to see it. I didnt know nothin about him. I thought I did. I think he knew a lot more about me. I'd like to take him back and bury him in his own country.

Quijada drained his cup and sat holding it in his lap.

I take it you dont think that's such a good idea.

I think you may have some problems.

But that aint all you think.

No.

You think he belongs where he's at.

I think the dead have no nationality.

No. But their kin do.

Quijada didnt answer. After a long time he stirred. He leaned forward. He turned the white porcelain bowl up and held it in the palm of his hand and regarded it. The world has no name, he said. The names of the cerros and the Sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. That they cannot find for us the way again. Your brother is in that place which the world has chosen for him. He is where he is supposed to be. And yet the place he has found is also of his own choosing. That is a piece of luck not to be despised.

GRAY SKY, gray land. All day he slouched north on the wet and slouching horse through the sandy muck of the upcountry roads. The rain went harrying over the road before him in the gusts of wind and rattled over his slicker and the hooftracks oozed shut behind him. In the evening he heard again the cranes overhead, passing high above the overcast, balancing beneath them the bight of the earth's curve, earth's weather. Their metal eyes grooved to the pathways which God has chosen for them to follow. Their hearts in flood.

He rode into the town of San Buenaventura in the evening and he rode through pools of standing water past the alameda with its whitepainted treetrunks and the old white church and out along the old road to Gallego. The rain had stopped and rain dripped from the alameda trees and dripped from the high canales in the mudwalled houses he passed. The road led up through the low hills to the east of the town and set in a bench of land there a mile or so above the town lay the cemetery.

He turned off and slogged out along the muddy lane and halted his horse before the wooden gates. The cemetery was a large and wild enclosure set in a field filled with loose stones and brambles and surrounded by a low mud wall already then in ruins. He halted and looked out over this desolation. He turned and looked back at the packhorse and he looked at the gray scud of clouds and at the evening light failing in the west. A wind was blowing down from the gap in the mountains and he stepped down and dropped the reins and passed through the gate and started out across the rough cobbled field. A raven flew up out of the bracken and parried away on the wind croaking thinly. The red sandstone dolmens that stood upright among the low tablets and crosses on that wild heath looked like the distant ruins of some classic enclave ringed about by the blue mountains, the closer hills.

Most of the graves were no more than cairns of rock without marker of any kind. Some held a simple wooden cross composed of two slats nailed together or twisted together with wire. The cobbled rocks everywhere underfoot were the scattered remains of these cairns and ignoring the red stone steles this place looked the burial of some aftermath of battle. Other than the wind in the wild rough grass there was no sound at all. He walked out along a narrow and uncertain footpath winding among the graves, among the slabs and sepulchre tablets blacked over with lichen. In the middle distance a red stone pillar in the shape of a pollarded treetrunk.

His brother was buried against the southmost wall under a board cross in which had been burned with a hot nail the words Fall el 24 de febrero 1943 sus hermanos en armas dedican este recuerdo D E P. A ring of rusted wire that once had been a wreath leaned against the board. There was no name.

He squatted and took off his hat. Off to the south a pile of trash was smoldering in the damp and a black smoke rose into the dark overcast. The desolation of that place was a thing exquisite.

It was dark when he rode back into Buenaventura. He dismounted before the church door and walked in and took off his hat. At the altar a few small candles burned and in that half fugitive light knelt a solitary figure bent at prayer. He walked up the aisle. There were loose tiles in the floor that rocked and clicked under his boots. He bent and touched the kneeling figure on the arm. Senora, he said.

She raised her head, a dark seamed face faintly visible in the darker folds of her rebozo.

Donde esta el sepulturero?

Muerto.

Quien esta encargado del cementerio?

Dios.

Donde esta el sacerdote.

Se fue.

He looked about at the dim interior of the church. The woman seemed to be waiting for further questions but he could think of none to put.

Que quiere, joven' she said.

Nada. Esta bien. He looked down at her. Por quien esta orando? he said.

She said that she only prayed. She said that she left it to God as to how the prayers should be apportioned. She prayed for all. She would pray for him.

Gracias.

No puedo hacerlo de otro modo.

He nodded. He knew her well enough, this old woman of Mexico, her sons long dead in that blood and violence which her prayers and her prostrations seemed powerless to appease. Her frail form was a constant in that land, her silent anguishings. Beyond the church walls the night harbored a millennial dread panoplied in feathers and the scales of royal fish and if it yet fed upon the children still who could say what worse wastes of war and torment and despair the old woman's constancy might not have stayed, what direr histories yet against which could be counted at last nothing more than her small figure bent and mumbling, her crone's hands clutching her beads of fruitseed. Unmoving, austere, implacable. Before just such a God.

When he rode out the next morning early the rain had stopped but the day had not cleared and the landscape lay gray under a gray sky. To the south the raw peaks of the Sierra del Nido loomed out of the clouds and closed away again. He dismounted at the wooden gate and hobbled the packhorse and untied the spade and mounted up again and rode out down the footpath among the cobbled rocks with the spade over his shoulder.

When he reached the gravesite he stood down and chucked the spade in the ground and took his gloves from the saddlebag and looked at the gray skies and finally he unsaddled the horse and hobbled it and left it to graze among the stones. Then he turned and squatted and rocked the fragile wooden cross loose in its clutch of rocks and lifted it away. The spade was a primitive thing helved in a long paloverde pole and the tang bore the marks where it had been beaten out over a pritchel and the seam rudely welded shut at the forge. He hefted it in his hand and looked again at the sky and bent and began to shovel away the cairn of loose rock over his brother's grave.

He was a long time at his work. He'd taken off his hat and after a while he took off his shirt and laid it across the wall. By what he reckoned to be noon he'd dug down some three feet and he stood the shovel in the dirt and walked back to where he'd left the saddle and the bags and he got out his lunch of beans wrapped in tortillas and sat in the grass eating and drinking water from the canvascovered zinc bottle. There had been no one along the road all morning except for a solitary bus, grinding slowly up the grade and on through the gap toward Gallego to the east.

In the afternoon three dogs appeared and sat down among the stones to watch him. He bent to pick up a rock but they ducked and vanished among the bracken. Later a car came out the cemetery road and stopped at the gate and two women came out along the path and went on to the far west corner of the burial ground. After a while they came back. The man who had driven them sat on the wall and smoked and watched Billy but he did not speak. Billy dug on.

Midafternoon the blade struck the box. He'd thought maybe there would be none. He dug on. By the time he had the top of the box dug clear there was little left of the day. He dug down along the side and felt along the wood for handles but he couldnt find any. He dug on until he had one end of the box clear and by then it was growing dark. He stood the spade in the loose dirt and went to get Nino.

He saddled the horse and led him back to the grave and took down the catchrope and doubled and dallied it and then worked the free end around the box, forcing it along the wood with the blade of the shovel. Then he pitched the shovel to one side and climbed out and untracted the horse and led him slowly forward.

The rope grew taut. He looked back. Then he eased the horse forward again. There was a muffled explosion of wood in the hole and the rope went slack. The horse stopped.

He walked back. The box had collapsed and he could see Boyd's bones in their burial clothes through the broken boards. He sat down in the dirt. The sun had set and it was growing dark. The horse stood at the end of the rope waiting. He felt suddenly cold and he got up and walked over to the wall and got his shirt and pulled it on and came back and stood.

You could just shovel the dirt back in, he said. It wouldnt take a hour.

He walked over to the saddlebags and got out his matches and came back and lit one and held it out over the grave. The box was badly caved. A musty cellar odor rose from the dark ground. He shook out the match and walked over to the horse and unhitched the rope and came back coiling it in his hand and he stood with the coiled rope in the blue and windless dusk and looked off to the north where under the overcast the earliest stars were burning. Well, he said. You could do that.

He worked the end of the rope loose from the coffinbox and laid the rope by on the mound of loose dirt. Then he took up the spade and with the blade of it he split away a long sliver of wood from one of the broken boards and knocked the dirt loose from it against the box and struck a match and got it lit and stood it slantwise in the ground. Finally he climbed down into the grave and by that pale and fluttering light he began to pry apart the boards with the spade and cast them out until the remains of his brother lay wholly to sight, composed on a pallet of rotting rags, lost in his clothes as always.

He rode the horse back out through the gate and got down and skylighted the packhorse off to the south and remounted and rode out and brought the animal back and led it through the gates and back to the grave. He dismounted and untied the bedroll and unrolled it on the ground and pulled loose the tarp and spread it out. It was a windless night and his cryptboard taper was still burning at the side of the grave. He climbed down into the excavation and gathered his brother up in his arms and lifted him out. He weighed nothing. He composed the bones upon the soogan and folded them away and tied the bundle shut at the ends with lengths of pigginstring while the horse stood watching. Over on the gravel highway he could hear the whine of a truck on the grade and the lights came up and swept slowly across the desert and over the bleak headlands and then the truck passed on in its pale wake of dust and ground on toward the east.

By the time he'd filled the grave back in it was close to midnight. He trod down the dirt with his boots and then shoveled the loose rocks back over the top and lastly he took the cross from where he'd leaned it against the wall and stood it in the rocks and piled rocks about it to support it. The wooden torch had long since burned out and he took the charred end of it up and threw it across the wall. Then he threw the spade after it.

He lifted Boyd and laid him across the wooden packframe and he rolled up the blankets from his bedroll and laid them across the horse's haunches and tied everything down. Then he walked over and picked up his hat and put it on and picked up the waterbottle and hung it by its strap over the saddlehorn and mounted up and turned the horse. He sat there for a minute taking a last look around. Then he got down again. He walked over to the grave and pulled the wooden cross loose from the cobbles and carried it back to the packhorse and tied it down on the leftside forks of the packtree and then mounted up again and leading the packhorse rode out through the cemetery and through the gate and down the road. When he reached the highway he crossed it and struck out crosscountry toward the watershed of the Santa Maria, keeping the polestar to his right, looking back from time to time to see how rode the canvas that held his brother's remains. The little desert foxes barking. The old gods of that country tracing his progress over the darkened ground. Perhaps logging his name into their ancient daybook of vanities.

In two nights' riding he passed the lights of Casas Grandes off to the west, the small city receding away behind him on the plain. He crossed the old road coming down from Guzman and Sabinal and struck the Casas Grandes River and took the trail north along the river bank. In the early morning hours and before it was quite light he passed through the pueblo of Corralitos, half abandoned, half in ruins. The houses of the town loopholed against the vanished Apaches. The naked slagheaps dark and volcanic against the skyline. He crossed the railroad tracks and an hour north of the town in the gray dawn four horsemen sallied forth from a grove of trees and halted their mounts in the track before him.

He reined the horse. The riders sat silently. The dark animals they rode raised their noses as if to search him out on the air. Beyond the trees the bright flat shape of the river lay like a knife. He studied the men. He'd not seen them move yet they seemed closer. They sat divided before him on the track two and two.

Que tiene alla? they said.

Los huesos de mi hermano.

They sat in silence. One of the riders detached himself and rode forward. He crossed the track in his riding forward and then crossed it back. Riding erect, archly. As if at some sinister dressage. He halted the horse almost within armreach and he leaned forward with his forearms crossed on the pommel of his saddle.

Huesos? he said.

Si.

The new light in the east was behind him and his face was a shadow under the shape of his hat. The other riders were darker figures yet. The rider sat upright in the saddle and looked back towards them. Then he turned to Billy again.

Abralo, he said.

No.

No?

They sat. There was a flash of white beneath his hat as if he'd smiled. What he'd done was to seize his horse's reins in his teeth. The next flash was a knife that had come from somewhere in his clothing and caught the light in turning for just a moment like a fish deep in a river. Billy dropped down from the offside of his horse. The bandolero caught up the packhorse's leadrope but the packhorse balked and squatted on its haunches and the man booted his horse forward and made a pass at the hitchropes with his knife while the packhorse sawed about on the end of the lead. Some among his companions laughed and the man swore and he hauled the packhorse forward and dallied the leadrope to his saddlehorn again and reached and cut the ropes and pulled the soogan of bones to the ground.

Billy was trying to undo the tie on the flap of the saddlebag to get to his pistol but Nino turned and stamped and backed away sawing his head. The bandolero undallied and cast off the leadrope and stepped down. The packhorse turned and went trotting. The man bent above the shrouded form on the ground and unseamed with a single long pass of the knife ropes and soogan all from end to end and kicked aside the coverings to reveal in the graying light Boyd's poor form in the loosely fitting coat with his hands crossed at his chest, the withered hands with the bones imprinted in the leather skin, lying there with his caven face turned up and clutching himself like some fragile being fraught with cold in that indifferent dawn.

You son of a bitch, said Billy. You son of a bitch.

Es un engano? said the man. Es un engano?

He kicked at the poor desiccated thing. He turned with the knife.

Donde esta el dinero?

Las alforjas, called out one of the riders. Billy had swung under Nino's neck and he reached again for the flap of the saddlebag on the horse's offside. The bandolero cut open the bedroll under his feet and kicked it apart and trod in it with his boots and turned and then reached and seized Nino's bridlereins. But the horse must have begun to see the loosening of some demoniac among them for he reared and backed and in his backing trod among the bones and he reared again and pawed and the bandolero was snatched off balance and one forehoof caught his belt and ripped it from him and tore open the front of his trousers. He scrambled from under the horse and swore wildly and made a grab again for the swinging reins and the men behind him laughed and before anyone would have thought of such a thing occurring he plunged his knife into the horse's chest.

The horse stopped and stood quivering. The point of the blade had bedded itself in the animal's breastbone and the bandolero stepped back and threw out his hands.

Goddamn you to hell, Billy said. He held the trembling horse by the throatlatch and took hold of the handle of the knife and pulled the blade from the horse's chest and flung it away. Blood welled, blood ran down the front of the horse. He snatched off his hat and pushed it against the wound and looked wildly back at the mounted men. They sat their horses as before. One of them leaned and spat and jerked his chin at the others. Vamonos, he said.

The bandolero was demanding that Billy go fetch the knife. Billy didnt answer. He held his hat against the horse's chest and tried once more to reach back and unfasten the saddlebag pocket but he could not reach it. The bandolero reached and got hold of the tiestraps and pulled down the saddlebags onto the ground and dragged them from under the horse.

Vamonos, called the rider.

But the bandolero had already found the pistol and he held it up to show to them. He dumped the bags out and kicked Billy's possibles over the ground, his spare clothes, his razor. He picked up a shirt and held it up and then draped it across his shoulder and he cocked the pistol and spun the cylinder and let the hammer down again. He stepped across the wreckage of the bones unshrouded from out of the soogan and cocked the pistol and put it to Billy's head and demanded his money. Billy could feel his hat going warm and sticky with blood where he held it to the horse's chest. The blood was seeping through the felt and running on his arm. You go to hell, he said.

Vamonos, called the rider. He turned his horse

The man with the pistol looked at them. Tengo que encontrar mi cuchillo, he called.

He uncocked the pistol and went to shove it in his belt but he had no belt. He turned and looked upriver where the day was coming beyond the brambly river breaks. The breath of the standing horses plumed and vanished. The leader told him to get his horse. He said that he did not need his knife and that he had killed a good horse for no reason.

Then they were gone. Billy stood holding the crushed and bloodsogged hat and he heard the horses crossing the river upstream and then he just heard the river and the first birds that were waking in that country and his own breath and the labored breathing of the horse. He put his arm around the horse's neck and held it and he could feel it trembling and feel it lean against him and he was afraid that it would die and he could feel in the horse's breast a despair much like his own.

He wrung the blood from the hat and wiped his hand on his trousers and unbuckled and pulled down the saddle and left it lying where it fell in the track along with the other wreckage there and he led the horse slowly out through the trees and across a gravel bar and into the river. The water was cold running into his boots and he talked to the horse and bent and lifted a hatful of water and poured it over the animal's chest. The horse steamed in the cold and its breathing had begun to suck and rattle and it sounded all wrong. He put the palm of his hand over the hole but the blood ran between his fingers. He stripped off his shirt and folded it and pushed it against the animal's chest but the shirt soon filled with blood and still the blood ran.

He'd let the reins trail in the river and he patted the horse and spoke to it and left it standing there while he waded to the river bank and clawed up a handful of wet clay from under the roots of the willows. He came back and plastered the clay over the wound and troweled it down with the flat of his hand. He rinsed out the shirt and wrung the water from it and folded it over the plaster of mud and waited in the gray light with the steam rising off the river. He didnt know if the blood would ever stop running but it did and in the first pale reach of sunlight across the eastern plain the gray landscape seemed to hush and the birds to hush and in the new sun the peaks of the distant mountains to the west beyond the wild Bavispe country rose out of the dawn like a dream of the world. The horse turned and laid its long bony face upon his shoulder.

He led the animal ashore and up into the track and turned it to face the light. He looked in its mouth for blood but there was none that he could see. Old Nino, he said. Old Nino. He left the saddle and the saddlebags where they'd fallen. The trampled bedrolls. The body of his brother awry in its wrappings with one yellow forearm outflung. He walked the horse slowly at his elbow and held the mudstained shirt against its chest. His boots sloshed with river water and he was very cold. They walked up the track and into a grove of wild mahogany where he'd be partly hid from sight of any parties passing along the river and then he went back and got the saddle and the saddlebags and the bedroll. Lastly he went to fetch the remains of his brother.

The bones seemed held together only by the dry outer covering of hide and by their integuments but they were of a piece and nothing scattered. He knelt in the road and refolded the weightless arms and wrapped the soogan about and sorted the ropes and tied the ends to make the severed pieces do. By the time he had all this done the sun was well up and he gathered the bones in his arms and carried them up into the trees and laid them on the ground. Lastly he walked back out to the river and washed and wrung out his hat and filled it with river water and carried it back to the horse to see if it would drink. The horse would not. It was lying in the leaves and the shirt was lying in the leaves and the clay compress had begun to break away and blood was running from the wound again and pooling darkly in the little jagged cups of the dry mahogany leaves and the horse would not raise its head.

He walked out and looked for the packhorse but he couldnt see it. He went to the river and squatted and rinsed out the shirt and put it on and he got a fresh handful of clay from under the willows and carried it back and caked the new mud over the old and sat shivering in the leaves watching the horse. After a while he went back out and down the track to hunt for the other horse.

He couldnt find it. When he came back up the river he picked up the waterbottle where it lay by the side of the trail and he picked up his cup and his razor and walked back up to the trees. The horse was shivering in the leaves and he pulled one of the blankets from the bedroll and spread it over the horse and sat with his hand on the horse's shoulder and after a while he fell asleep.

He woke with a start from some half desperate dream. He bent over the horse where it lay quietly breathing among the leaves and he looked at the sun to see how far the day had got to. His shirt was almost dry on him and he unbuttoned the pocket and took out his money and spread it out to dry. Then he got the box of wood matches out of the saddlebags and spread them also. He walked out down the track to the spot where the ambuscade had occurred and cast about in the trackside chaparral until he found the knife. It was an oldfashioned dirk ground down out of a cheap military knife with an edge honed into both sides of the blade. He wiped it on his trousers and went back and put the knife with his other plunder. Then he walked out to where he'd left Boyd. A column of red ants had found the bones and he squatted in the leaves and studied them and then rose and trod them into the dirt and picked up the soogan and carried it out and lodged it in the fork of one of the trees and walked back and sat beside the horse.

No one passed the day long. In the afternoon he went once more to look for the other horse. He thought maybe it had gone upriver or that the highwaymen had taken it but in any case he never saw it again. By dark the matches had dried and he built a fire and put some beans to boil and sat by the fire and listened to the river passing in the dark. The cottoncolored moon that had stood in the daysky to the east rose overhead and he lay in his blankets and watched to see if any birds might cross before it on their way upriver north but if they did he did not see them and after a while he slept.

In the night as he slept Boyd came to him and squatted by the deep embers of the fire as he'd done times by the hundreds and smiled his soft smile that was not quite cynical and he took off his hat and held it before him and looked down into it. In the dream he knew that Boyd was dead and that the subject of his being so must be approached with a certain caution for that which was circumspect in life must be doubly so in death and he'd no way to know what word or gesture might subtract him back again into that nothingness out of which he'd come. When finally he did ask him what it was like to be dead Boyd only smiled and looked away and would not answer. They spoke of other things and he tried not to wake from the dream but the ghost dimmed and faded and he woke and lay looking up at the stars through the bramblework of the treelimbs and he tried to think of what that place could be where Boyd was but Boyd was dead and wasted in his bones wrapped in the soogan upriver in the trees and he turned his face to the ground and wept.

He was asleep in the morning when he heard the shouts of arrieros and the crack of whips and a wild singing in the woods downriver. He pulled on his boots and walked out to where the horse lay in the leaves. Its side rose and fell beneath the blanket that he had feared would be stiff and cold and it turned up one eye to him as he knelt over it. An eye in which lay cupped the sky and arching trees and his own nearing face. He placed one hand over the animal's chest where the mud had caked and dried and broken. The hair was stiff and bristly with dried blood. He stroked the muscled shoulder and spoke to the horse and the horse exhaled slowly through its nose.

He fetched water again in his hat but the horse could not drink without rising. He sat and wet its mouth with his hand and listened to the arrieros on the track drawing nearer and after a while he rose and walked out and stood waiting for them.

They appeared out of the trees driving a team of six yoked oxen and they wore costumes such as he'd never seen before. Indians or gypsies perhaps by the bright colors of the shirts and the sashes that they wore. They drove the oxen with jerkline and jockeystick and the oxen labored and swayed in the traces and their breath steamed in the morning cold. Behind them on a handmade float built from green lumber and carried on old truckaxles was an airplane. It was of some ancient vintage and it was disassembled and the wings tied down with ropes alongside the fuselage. The rudder in the vertical stabilizer swung back and forth in small erratic movements with the jostling of the float as if to make corrections in their course and the oxen swayed heavily in their harness and the mismatched rubber tires rumpled softly over the stones and through the weeds on either side of the narrow track.

The drovers when they saw him raised their hands in greeting and cried out. Almost as if they'd been expecting to come upon him soon or late. They wore necklaces and silver bracelets and some wore hooplets of gold in their ears and they called out to him and pointed along the narrow road upstream in the river's bend to a grassy flat where they would stop and rendezvous. The airplane was little more than a skeleton with sunbleached shreds of linen the color of stewed rhubarb clinging to the steambent ashwood ribs and stays and inside you could see the wires and cables that ran aft to the rudder and elevators and the cracked and curled and sunblacked leather of the seats and in their tarnished nickel bezels the glass of instrument dials glaucous and clouded from the pumicing of the desert sands. The wingstruts were tied in bundles alongside and the blades of the propellor were bent back along the cowling and the landingstruts were bent beneath the fuselage.

They passed on and halted in the flat and they left the youngest among them to tend the animals and then they came back down the track rolling cigarettes and passing among them an esclarajo made from a So caliber shellcasing in which burned a bit of tow. They were gypsies from Durango and the first thing that they asked him was what was the matter with the horse.

He told them that the horse was wounded and that he thought its condition was serious. One of them asked him when this had occurred and he said that it was the day before. He sent one of the younger men back to the float and in a few minutes he returned with an old canvas musette bag. Then they all walked up through the trees toaEU'look at the horse.

The gypsy knelt in the leaves and looked first into the animal's eyes. Then he pinched away the cracked mud from its chest and looked at the wound. He looked up at Billy.

Herida de cuchillo, said Billy.

The gypsy's expression did not change and he did not take his eyes from Billy. Billy looked at the other men. They were squatting on their haunches about the horse. He thought that if the horse died they might eat it. He said that the horse had been attacked by a lunatic one of four among a band of robbers. The man nodded. He passed his hand across the underside of his chin. He did not look at the horse again. He asked Billy if he wanted to sell the horse and Billy knew for the first time that the horse would live.

They squatted there, all watching him. He looked at the drover. He said that the horse had belonged to his father and that he could not part with him and the man nodded and opened the bag.

Porfirio, he said. Traigame agua.

He looked down through the trees toward Billy's camp where a thin wisp of smoke stood in the morning air motionless as rope. He called after the man to put the water to boil and then looked at Billy again. Con su permiso, he said.

Por supuesto.

Ladrones.

Si. Ladrones.

The drover looked down at the horse. He gestured with his chin out toward the tree where Boyd's bones were lodged in their trussings.

Que tiene alla? he said.

Los huesos de mi hermano.

Huesos, said the gypsy. He turned and looked toward the river where his man had gone with the bucket. The other three men crouched waiting. Rafael, he said. Lena. He turned to Billy and smiled. He looked about at the little grove of trees and he put the flat of his hand to his cheek in a curious gesture such as a man might make who remembers he has forgotten something. He wore on one forefinger an ornate ring of gold and jewels and he wore a golden rope about his throat. He smiled again and gestured toward the fire that they proceed there.

They collected wood and built back the fire and they fetched rocks to make a trivet and there they set the bucket to boil. Soaking in the pail were several handfuls of small green leaves and the waterbearer had covered the bucket with what looked to be an old brass cymbal and all sat about the fire and watched the bucket and after a while it began to steam among the flames.

The one called Rafael lifted the cover with a stick and laid the cover by and stirred the green froth within and then put the cover back again. A pale green tea ran down the sides of the bucket and hissed in the fire. The chief of the drovers sat rolling a cigarette. He passed the cloth pouch on to the man beside him and he leaned and took a burning branch from the fire and with his head cocked to one side lit the cigarette and then put the branch back in the fire. Billy asked him if he himself was not afraid of robbers in that country but the man only said that the robbers were loath to molest the gitanos for they also were men of the road.

Y adonde van con el aeroplano? said Billy.

The gypsy gestured with his chin. Al none, he said.

They smoked. The bucket steamed. The gypsy smiled.

Con respecto al aeroplano, he said, hay tres historias. Cual quiere oir?

Billy smiled. He said that he wished to hear the true history. The gypsy pursed his lips. He seemed to be considering the plausibility of this. Finally he said that it was necessary to state that there were two such airplanes, both of them flown by young Americans, both lost in the mountains in the calamitous summer of nineteen fifteen.

He drew deeply upon the cigarette and blew the smoke toward the fire. Certain facts were known, he said. There was common ground and there one could begin. This airplane had sat in the high desert mountains of Sonora and the wind and the blowing sand had flayed it of its fabric and passing Indians had pried away and carried off the brass inspection plate from the instrument panel for amulet and there it had languished on in that wild upcountry lost and unclaimed and indeed unclaimable for nearly thirty years. Thus far all was a single history. Whether there be two planes or one. Whichever plane was spoken of it was the same.

He drew carefully at the stub of the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, one dark eye asquint against the smoke rising past his nose in the motionless air. Finally Billy asked him whether it made any difference which plane it was since there was no difference to be spoken of. The gypsy nodded. He seemed to approve of the question although he did not answer it. He said that the father of the dead pilot had contracted for the removal of the airplane to a place on the border just east of Palomas. He had sent his agent to the town of MaderaaEU'pueblo que conoceaEU'and this agent was himself such a man as might ask just such a question.

He smiled. He smoked the last of the cigarette to an ash and let the ash fall into the fire and blew the smoke slowly after. He licked his thumb and wiped it on the knee of his trousers. He said that for men of the road the reality of things was always of consequence. He said that the strategist did not confuse his devices with the reality of the world for then what would become of him? El mentiroso debe primero saber la verdad, he said. De acuerdo?

He nodded toward the fire. The watercarrier rose and jostled the coals with a stick and fed more wood under the pail and returned to his place again. The gypsy waited till he was done. Then he continued. He spoke of the identity of the little canvas biplane as having no meaning except in its history and he said that since this tattered artifact was known to have a sister in the same condition the question of identity had indeed been raised. He said that men assume the truth of a thing to reside in that thing without regard to the opinions of those beholding it while that which is fraudulent is held to be so no matter how closely it might duplicate the required appearance. If the airplane which their client has paid to be freighted out of the wilderness and brought to the border were in fact not the machine in which the son has died then its close resemblance to that machine is hardly a thing in its favor but is rather one more twist in the warp of the world for the deceiving of men. Where then is the truth of this? The reverence attached to the artifacts of history is a thing men feel. One could even say that what endows any thing with significance is solely the history in which it has participated. Yet wherein does that history lie?

The gypsy looked away upriver to where the airplane sat beyond the trees. He seemed to ponder its shape there. As if were contained in that primitive construction some yet uncoded clue to the campaigns of the revolution, the strategies of Angeles, the tactics of Villa. Y por que to quiere el cliente? he said. Que despues de todo no es nada mas que el ataud de su hijo?

No one answered. After a while the gypsy continued. He said that he'd thought at one time that the client wished simply to have the aircraft as a memento. He whose son's bones were themselves long scattered on the sierra. Now his thought was different. He said that as long as the airplane remained in the mountains then its history was of a piece. Suspended in time. Its presence on the mountain was its whole story frozen in a single image for all to contemplate. The client thought and he thought rightly that could he remove that wreckage from where it lay year after year in rain and snow and sun then and then only could he bleed it of its power to commandeer his dreams. The gypsy gestured with one hand in a slow suave gesture. La historic del hijo termina en las montanas, he said. Y por alla queda la realidad de el.

He shook his head. He said that simple tasks often prove most difficult. He said that in any case this gift from the mountains had no real power to quiet an old man's heart because once more its journey would be stayed and nothing would be changed. And the identity of the airplane would be brought into question which in the mountains was no question at all. It was forcing a decision. It was a difficult matter. And as is so often the case God had finally taken a hand and decided things himself. For ultimately both airplanes were carried down from the mountain and one was in the Rio Papigochic and the other was before them. Como to ve.

They waited. Rafael rose again and prodded the fire and he lifted the lid from the pail and stirred the steaming soup within and reaEU'covered it. The gypsy in the meantime had rolled another cigarette and lit it. He considered how to continue.

Town of Madera. A stained and whimsical map printed on poor paper already severing at the folds. A canvas bankbag full of silver pesos. Two men met almost by chance neither of whom would ever trust the other. The gypsy thinned his lips in what would not quite pass for a smile. He said that where expectations are few disappointments are rare. They had gone into the mountains in the fall two years ago and they had built a sled from the limbs of trees and by this conveyance had brought the wreckage to the rim of the great gorge of the Papigochic River. There with rope and windlass they would lower the thing to the river and there build a raft by which to ferry it carcass and wings and struts all down to the bridge on the Mesa Tres Rios road and from there overland to the border west of Palomas. Snow drove them from the high country before they ever reached the river.

The other men about that pale dayfire seemed to attend his words closely. As if they themselves were only recent conscriptees to this enterprise. The gypsy spoke slowly. He described to them the nature of the country where the airplane had gone down. The wildness of it and the high grassy vegas and the deep barrancas where the days were polar in their brevity, barrancas in the floor of which great rivers looked no more than bits of string. They quit the country and returned again in the spring. They had no money left. A seeress tried to warn them back. One of their own. He had weighed the woman's words, but he knew what she did not. That if a dream can tell the future it can also thwart that future. For God will not permit that we shall know what is to come. He is bound to no one that the world unfold just so upon its course and those who by some sorcery or by some dream might come to pierce the veil that lies so darkly over all that is before them may serve by just that vision to cause that God should wrench the world from its heading and set it upon another course altogether and then where stands the sorcerer? Where the dreamer and his dream? He paused that all might contemplate this. That he might contemplate it himself. Then he continued. He spoke of the cold in the mountains at that season. He populated the terrain for them with certain birds and animals. Parrots. Tigers. Men of another time living in the caves of that country so remote that the world had overlooked to kill them. The Tarahumara standing half naked along the sheer rock wall of the void while the fuselage and the wingstructure of the broken plane dangled in the blue and grew small and turned slowly in the deepening gulf of the barranca silent and chimeless and far below them the shapes of vultures in slow spirals like bits of ash in an updraft.

He spoke of the rapids in the river and the great rocks that stood in the gorge and the rain in the mountains in the night and the way the river went howling through the narrows like a train and at night the rain which had fallen for miles into that ultimate sundering of the earth's rind hissed in their driftwood fires and the solid rock about them through which the water roared would shudder like a woman and if they spoke to one another no words formed in the air for the awful noise in that nether world.

They passed nine days in the gorge while the rain fell and the river rose until at last they were socketed high in a rocky crevice like refugent woodmice seven of them without food or fire and the whole gorge trembling as if the world itself were like to cleave beneath them and swallow up all and they posted watches in the night until he himself asked what it was they watched for? What do if it came?

The brass cymbal over the bucket rose slightly along one edge and a green froth belched forth and ran down the side of the bucket and the cymbal fell again soundlessly. The gitano reached and tipped the end of ash from his cigarette thoughtfully into the coals.

Nueve dias. Nueve noches. Sin comida. Sin fuego. Sin nada. The river rose and they tied the raft with the windlass ropes and then with vines and the river rose and ate away the raft by pole and by plank and nothing to be done for it and the rain fell. First the wings were swept away. They hung he and his men from the rocks in the howling darkness like beleaguered apes and screamed mutely to one another in the maelstrom and his primo Macio descended to secure the fuselage although what use it could be without the wings none knew and Macio himself was nearly swept away and lost. On the morning of the tenth day the rain ceased. They made their way along the rocks in the wet gray dawn but all sign of their enterprise had vanished aEU'in the flood as if it had never been at all. The river continued to rise and on the morning of the day following while they sat staring at the hypnotic flume below them a drowned man shot out of the cataract upriver like a pale enormous fish and circled once facedown in the froth of the eddywater beneath them as if he were looking for something on the river's floor and then he was sucked away downriver to continue his journey. He'd come already a long way in his travels by the look of him for his clothes were gone and much of his skin and all but the faintest nap of hair upon his skull all scrubbed away by his passage over the river rocks. In his circling in the froth he moved all loosely and disjointed as if there were no bones to him. Some incubus or mannequin. But when he passed beneath them they could see revealed in him that of which men were made that had better been kept from them. They could see bones and ligaments and they could see the tables of his smallribs and through the leached and abraded skin the darker shapes of organs within. He circled and gathered speed and then exited in the roaring flume as if he had pressing work downriver.

The gypsy blew softly through his teeth. He studied the fire.

Y entonces que? said Billy.

He shook his head. As if the recollection of these things were a trial to him. Ultimately they had climbed out of the gorge and made their way out of the mountains as far as Sahuaripa and there they had waited until at last a truck came droning down the all but impassable road from Divisaderos and they rode in the bed of this truck for four days, sitting with shovels across their knees, shapeless with mud, climbing down times uncounted to dig and pitch in the muck like convicts while the driver shouted at them from the cab and then groaning on again. To Bacanora. To Tonichi. North again out of Nuri to San Nicolas and Yecora and on through the mountains to Temosachic and Madera where the man with whom they had first contracted would demand the return of the monies advanced them.

The gypsy pitched the stub of his cigarette into the fire and crossed his boots before him and drew them to him in his hands and sat leaning forward studying the flames. Billy asked him if the airplane had ever been found and he said that it had not for indeed there was nothing to find. Billy then asked him why they had returned to Madera at all and the man weighed this question. Finally he said that he did not believe that it was by chance that he had first met this man and been hired to go into the mountains nor was it chance that sent the rains and flooded the Papigochic. They sat. The tender of the pail rose a third time and stirred it and set it by to cool. Billy looked at the solemn faces about the fire. The bones beneath the olive skin. World wanderers. They squatted lightly there in that ring in the wood, at once vigilant and unconstrained. They stood in no proprietary relationship to anything, scarcely even to the space they occupied. Out of their anterior lives they had arrived at the same understanding as their fathers before them. That movement itself is a form of property. He looked at them and he said that the airplane they now freighted north along the road was then some other airplane.

The black eyes all shifted to the leader of their small clan. He sat for a long time. It was very quiet. Out on the road one of the oxen began to piss loudly. Finally he shaped his mouth and said that he believed that fate had intervened in the matter for its own good reasons. He said that fate might enter into the affairs of men in order to contravene them or set them at naught but to say that fate could deny the true and uphold the false would seem to be a contradictory view of things. To speak of a will in the world that ran counter to one's own was one thing. To speak of such a will that ran counter to the truth was quite another, for then all was rendered senseless. Billy then asked him if it was his notion that the false plane had been swept away by God in order to single out the true and the gypsy said that it was not. When Billy said that he had understood him to say that it was God who had ultimately made the decision concerning the two planes the gypsy said that he believed that to be so but he did not believe that by this act God had spoken to anyone. He said that he was not a superstitious man. The gypsies heard this out and then turned to Billy to see how he would respond. Billy said that it seemed to him that the freighters did not hold the identity of the airplane to be of any great consequence but the guano only turned and studied him with those dark and troubled eyes. He said that it was indeed of consequence and that it was in fact the whole burden of their inquiry. From a certain perspective one might even hazard to say that the great trouble with the world was that that which survived was held in hard evidence as to past events. A false authority clung to what persisted, as if those artifacts of the past which had endured had done so by some act of their own will. Yet the witness could not survive the witnessing. In the world that came to be that which prevailed could never speak for that which perished but could only parade its own arrogance. It pretended symbol and summation of the vanished world but was neither. He said that in any case the past was little more than a dream and its force in the world greatly exaggerated. For the world was made new each day and it was only men's clinging to its vanished husks that could make of that world one husk more.

La cascara no es la cosa, he said. It looked the same. But it was not.

Y la tercera historic? said Billy.

La tercera historic, said the gypsy, es esta. E1 existe en la historic de las historian. Es que ultimadamente la verdad no puede quedar en ningun otro lugar sino en el habla. He held his hands before him and looked at his palms. As if they may have been at some work not of his own doing. The past, he said, is always this argument between counterclaimants. Memories dim with age. There is no repository for our images. The loved ones who visit us in dreams are strangers. To even see aright is effort. We seek some witness but the world will not provide one. This is the third history. It is the history that each man makes alone out of what is left to him. Bits of wreckage. Some bones. The words of the dead. How make a world of this? How live in that world once made?

He looked toward the pail. The steam had ceased rising and he nodded and stood. Rafael rose and took up the musette bag and slung it over one shoulder and picked up the pail and all followed the gypsy up through the river woods to where the horse lay and there one of the men knelt and raised up the horse's head from the ground while Rafael took from the bag a leather funnel and a length of rubber hose and they gripped the horse's mouth and opened up its jaws while he greased the hose and ran it down the horse's gullet and twisted the funnel over the end and then they poured with no ceremony the contents of the pail into the horse.

When they had done the gypsy washed again the dried blood from the horse's chest and examined the wound and then dredged up a double handful of the cooked leaves from the floor of the bucket and packed them against the wound in a poultice which he bound up with burlap sacking and tied with cord over the horse's neck and behind its forelegs. When he was done he rose and stepped back and stood looking down at the animal with long contemplation. The horse looked very strange indeed. It half raised its head and blinked at them and then wheezed and stretched its neck in the leaves and lay there. Bueno, said the gypsy. He looked at Billy and smiled.

They stood in the road and the guano pulled the brim of his hat down level and slid the scrimshawed length of birdbone which he used for a drawtie up under his chin and looked at the oxen and at the float and the airplane. He looked out through the trees to where the rolled soogan that held Boyd's body was wedged in the low branches of the tascate tree. He looked at Billy.

Estoy regresandole a mi pais, Billy said.

The gypsy smiled again and looked north along the road. Otros huesos, he said. Otros hermanos. He said that as a child he had traveled a good deal in the land of the gavacho. He said he'd followed his father through the streets of western cities and they collected odds of junk from the houses there and sold them. He said that sometimes in trunks and boxes they would come upon old photographs and tintypes. These likenesses had value only to the living who had known them and with the passage of years of such there were none. But his father was a gypsy and had a gypsy mind and he would hang these cracked and fading likenesses by clothespins from the crosswires above the cart. There they remained. No one ever asked about them. No one wished to buy them. After a while the boy took them for a cautionary tale and he would search those sepia faces for some secret thing they might divulge to him from the days of their mortality. The faces became very familiar to him. By their antique clothing they were long dead and he pondered them where they sat posed on porchsteps, seated in chairs in a yard. All past and all future and all stillborn dreams cauterized in that brief encapture of light within the camera's closet. He searched those faces. Looks of vague discontent. Looks of rue. Perhaps some burgeoning bitterness at things in fact not yet come to be which yet were now forever past.

His father said that the gorgios were an inscrutable lot and so he found them to be. In and out of all depicting. The photographs that hung from the wire became for him a form of query to the world. He sensed in them a certain power and he guessed that the gorgios considered them bad luck for they would scarcely look at them but the truth was darker yet as truth is wont to be.

What he came to see was that as the kinfolk in their fading stills could have no value save in another's heart so it was with that heart also in another's in a terrible and endless attrition and of any other value there was none. Every representation was an idol. Every likeness a heresy. In their images they had thought to find some small immortality but oblivion cannot be appeased. This was what his father meant to tell him and this was why they were men of the road. This was the why of the yellowing daguerreotypes swinging by their clothespegs from the crosswise of his father's cart.

He said that journeys involving the company of the dead were notorious for their difficulty but that in truth every journey was so accompanied. He said that in his opinion it was imprudent to suppose that the dead have no power to act in the world, for their power is great and their influence often most weighty with just those who suspect it least. He said that what men do not understand is that what the dead have quit is itself no world but is also only the picture of the world in men's hearts. He said that the world cannot be quit for it is eternal in whatever form as are all things within it. In those faces that shall now be forever nameless among their outworn chattels there is writ a message that can never be spoken because time would always slay the messenger before he could ever arrive.

He smiled. Pensamos, he said, que somos las victimas del tiempo. En realidad la via del mundo no es fijada en ningun lugar. Como seria posible? Nosotros mismos somos nuestra propia jornada. Y por eso somos el tiempo tambien. Somos to mismo. Fugitivo. Inescrutable. Desapiadado.

He turned and spoke in romany to the others and one of them took a bullwhip from the keepers nailed to the sideboards of the float and uncoiled it and sent it looping through the air where the crack of it echoed like a gunshot in the woods and the caravan lurched into motion. The gypsy turned and smiled. He said that perhaps they would meet again upon some other road for the world was not so wide as men imagined. When Billy asked him how much he owed him for his services he dismissed the debt with a wave of his hand. Para el camino, he said. Then he turned and set off up the road after the others. Billy stood holding the thin sheaf of bloodstained banknotes he'd taken from his pocket. He called out to the gypsy and the gypsy turned.

Gracias, he called.

The gypsy raised one hand. Por nada.

Yo no soy un hombre del camino.

But the gypsy only smiled and waved one hand. He said that the way of the road was the rule for all upon it. He said that on the road there were no special cases. Then he turned and strode on after the others.

IN THE EVENING the horse rose and stood on trembling legs. He did not halter it but only walked alongside the animal out to the river where it stepped very carefully into the water and drank endlessly. In the evening while he was fixing his supper from the tortillas and goatcheese the gypsies had left him a rider came along the road. Solitary. Whistling. He stopped among the trees. Then he came on more slowly.

Billy stood and walked out to the road and the rider halted and sat his horse. He pushed his hat back slightly, the better to see, the better to be seen. He looked at Billy and at the fire and at the horse lying in the woods beyond.

Buenas tardes, said Billy.

The rider nodded. He was riding a good horse and he wore good boots and a good Stetson hat and he was smoking a small black puro. He took the puro out of his mouth and spat and put it back.

You speak american? he said.

Yessir. I do.

I thought you looked about halfway sensible. What the hell are you doin out here? What's wrong with that horse?

Well sir, I guess I'm mindin my own business. I reckon I could even say the same about the horse.

The man paid no attention. He aint dead is he?

No. He aint. He got cut by roadagents.

Cut by roadagents?

Yessir.

You mean they putted him?

No. I mean they stabbed him in the chest with a pigsticker. Whatever in the hell for?

You tell me.

I dont know.

Well I dont either.

The rider sat smoking contemplatively. He looked out across the landscape to the west of the river. I dont understand this country, he said. Not the first thing about it. You aint got any coffee anywheres about your person I dont reckon

I got some perkin. You want to light I got some supper fixin. It aint much but you're welcome.

Well I'd take it as a kindness.

He stepped down wearily and passed the bridlereins behind his back and adjusted his hat again and came forward leading the horse. Not the first damn thing, he said. Did you see my airplane come through here?

They squatted by the fire as the woods darkened and they waited for the coffee to boil. I never would of thought about them gypsies stickin the way they done, the man said. I had my doubts about em. One thing about me, when I'm wrong I'll admit it.

Well. That's a good trait to have.

Yes it is.

They ate the beans rolled up in the tortillas together with the melted cheese. The cheese was rank and goaty. Billy lifted the lid from the coffeepot with a stick and looked in and put the lid back. He looked at the man. The man was seated tailorwise on the ground holding the soles of his boots together with one hand.

You look like you might of been, down here a while, the man said.

I dont know. What does that look like?

Like you need to get back.

Well. You probably right about that. This is my third trip. It's the only time I was ever down here that I got what I come after. But it sure as hell wasnt what I wanted.

The man nodded. He didnt seem to need to know what that was. I'll tell you what, he said. It will be one cold day in hell when you catch me down here again. A frosty son of a bitch. I'll tell you that flat out.

Billy poured the coffee. They drank. The coffee was vilely hot in the tin cups but the man seemed not to notice. He drank and sat looking out through the dark woods toward the river and the silver panels of the river plaited over the gravel bars in the moonlight. Downriver the nacre bowl of the moon sat swaged into the reefs of cloud like a candled skull. He flipped the dregs of coffee into the darkness. I better get on, he said.

You welcome to stay.

I enjoy to ride of a night.

Well.

I believe a man can even cover more ground.

There's robbers all in this country, Billy said.

Robbers, the man said. He contemplated the fire. After a while he took one of the thin black cigars from his pocket and studied that. Then he bit the tip from it and spat it into the fire.

You smoke cigars?

I aint never took it up.

It aint against your religion?

Not that I know of.

The man leaned and pulled a burning billet from the fire and lit the cigar with it. It took some lighting to get it to burn. When he had it going he put the piece of wood back in the fire and blew a smoke ring and then blew a smaller one through the center of it.

What time did they leave out of here? he said.

I dont know. Noon maybe.

They wont make ten mile.

It might of been later.

Ever time I lay over somewheres they have a breakdown. They aint failed a time. My own fault. I keep gettin sidetracked by them senoritas. I liked them mamselles over yonder awful well too. I like it when they dont speak no english. Did you get over there?

No.

He reached into the fire and took out the stick he'd used to light his cigar and whipped away the flame and then turned and drew in the dark behind him with the red and smoldering end of it like a child. After a while he put it back in the fire again.

How bad's your horse? he said.

I dont know. He's been down two days.

You ought to of got that gypsy to see about him. They're supposed to know everthing there is about a horse.

Is that right?

I dont know. I know they're good at makin a sick one look well long enough to sell it.

I aint lookin to sell it.

I'll tell you what you better do.

What's that?

Keep this here fire built up.

Why is that.

Mountain lions is why. Horsemeat's their favorite kind.

Billy nodded. I always heard that, he said.

You know why you always heard it?

Why I always heard it?

Yeah.

No. Why?

Cause it's right is why.

You think most of what a man hears is right?

That's been my experience.

It aint been mine.

The man sat smoking and contemplating the fire. After a while he said: It aint been mine neither. I just said that. I wasnt over yonder like I said neither. I'm a fouraEU'F. Always was, always will be.

Did those gypsies bring that airplane out of the sierras and down the Papigochic River?

Is that what they said?

Yeah.

That airplane come out of a barn on the Taliafero Ranch out of Flores Magon. It couldnt even fly where you're talkin about. The ceiling on that plane aint but six thousand feet.

Was the man that flew it killed in it?

Not that I know of.

Was that why you come down here? To find that plane and take it back?

I come down here cause I'd knocked up a girl in McAllen Texas and her daddy wanted to shoot me.

Billy stared into the fire.

You talk about runnin into the arms of that which you have fled from, the man said. You ever been shot?

No.

I have twice. The last time was in downtown Cuauhtemoc broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon. Everbody run. There was two Mennonite women picked me up out of the street and loaded me into a wagon or I'd still be layin there.

Where'd they shoot you at?

Right here, he said. He turned and pushed the hair back above his right temple. See there? You can see it.

He leaned and spat into the fire and looked at the cigar and put it back in his mouth. He smoked. I aint crazy, he said.

I never said you was.

No. You might of thought it though.

You might of thought it about me.

Might.

Did that happen or did you just say it?

No. It happened.

My brother was shot and killed down here. I'd come down to take him home. He was shot and killed south of here. Town called San Lorenzo.

You can get killed down here about as quick as anything else you might decide to do.

My daddy was shot and killed in New Mexico. That's his horse layin over yonder.

It's a cruel world, the man said.

He come out of Texas in nineteen and nineteen. He was about the age I am now. He was not born there. He was born in Missouri.

I had a uncle was born in Missouri. His daddy fell off a wagon drunk in the mud one night goin through there and that's how it come about that he was born in Missouri.

My mama was from off a ranch up in De Baca County. Her mother was a fullblooded Mexican didnt speak no english. She lived with us up until she died. I had a younger sister died when I was seven but I remember her just as plain. I went to Fort Summer to try and find her grave but I couldnt find it. Her name was Margaret. I always liked that name for a girl. If I ever had a girl that's what I'd name her.

I better get on.

Well.

Mind what I said about your fire.

Well.

You sound like you've had your share of troubles in this world.

I just got to jabberin. I been more fortunate than most. There aint but one life worth livin and I was born to it. That's worth all the rest. My bud was better at it than me. He was a born natural. He was smarter than me too. Not just about horses. About everthing. Daddy knew it too. He knew it and he knew I knew it and that's all there was to say about it.

I better get on.

You take care.

I will do it.

He rose, he adjusted his hat. The moon was high and the sky had cleared. The river where it lay behind the trees looked like poured metal.

This world will never be the same, the rider said. Did you know that?

I know it. It aint now.

FOUR DAYS LATER he set out north along the river with the remains of his brother trestled up in a travois he'd made from sapling poles dragging behind the horse. They were three days reaching the border. He rode past the first of the white obelisks marking the international boundary line west of Dog Springs and he crossed the ancient dry reservoir there. The old earthworks were broken out in places and he rode across the cracked clay floor of the reservoir with the travois poles rasping behind him. There were prints in the clay of cattle and antelope and of coyotes that had crossed after some recent rain and he came upon a place that was runed over all about with the random trident of cranetracks where the birds had glided in and stalked about upon that barren mud. He slept that night in his own country and he had a dream wherein he saw God's pilgrims laboring upon a darkened verge in the last of the twilight of that day and they seemed to be returning from some deep enterprise that was not of war nor were they yet in flight but rather seemed coming from some labor to which perhaps these and all other things stood subjugate. A dark arroyo separated him from the place where they were going and he looked to see if he could tell by the nature of their implements what it was that they had been about but they carried none and they toiled on in silence against a sky that was darkening all around and then they were gone. When he woke in the round darkness about he thought that something had indeed passed in the desert night and he was awake a long time but he had no sense that it would ever return again.

The day following he rode through Hermanas and out along the dusty road west and that evening he sat the horse in the crossroads in front of the store in Hatchita and he looked away toward the southwest where the late sun was on the Animas Peaks and he knew that he would not be going there again. He crossed the Animas Valley slowly dragging the travois and he was all day in the doing of it. When he entered the town of Animas the morning of the following day it was Ash Wednesday by the calendar and the first folk he saw were Mexicans with sootmarks on their foreheads, five children and a woman walking singlefile along the dusty edge of the road out from the town. He wished them a good day but they only blessed themselves on seeing the body in the travois and passed on. He bought a spade at the hardware store and set out south from the town till he came to the little cemetery and he hobbled the horse and left it to graze outside the gates while he worked at digging the grave.

He was down to his waist in the dry dirt and caliche when the sheriff pulled up and got out and walked down through the gate.

I suspicioned it was you, he said.

Billy paused and leaned on the spade and squinted up at him. He'd taken off his rag of a shirt and he reached and picked it up off the ground and wiped the sweat from his forehead with it and stood waiting.

That's your brother layin yonder I take it, the sheriff said.

Yessir.

The sheriff shook his head. He looked off out over the country. As if there was something about it that you just couldnt quite lay your hand on. He looked down at Billy.

There aint much to say, is there?

No sir. Not much.

Well. You caint just travel around the country buryin people. Let me go see the judge and see if I can get him to issue a death certificate. I aint even sure whose property that is you're diggin in.

Yessir.

You come see me in Lordsburg tomorrow.

All right.

The sheriff pulled his hat down and shook his head again and turned and walked back out through the gate toward his car.

Days to come he rode north to Silver City and west to Duncan Arizona and north again through the mountains to Glenwood, to Reserve. He worked for the Carrizozos and for the GS's and he left for no reason he could name and in July of that year he drifted south again to Silver City and took the old road east past the Santa Rita mines and on through San Lorenzo and the Black Range. A wind was coming off the mountains to the north and the prairie before him had darkened under the moving clouds. The horse shuffled along with its head down and the rider rode very erect with his hat pulled low across his eyes. The country was all catclaw and creosote on a gravel plain and there were no fences and little grass. A few miles on and he struck the blacktop road and sat the horse. A truck whined past and drew away into the distance. Eighty miles away the raw rock ranges of the Organ Mountains shining under the clouds in the paneled light of the late sun. As he watched they faded into shadow. The wind coming off the desert had spits of rain in it. He crossed through the bar ditch and rode up onto the blacktop and slowed the horse and looked back. The panicgrass volunteered along the selvedge of the road heeled and twisted in the wind. He turned back along the highway toward some buildings he'd seen. The castoff tirecasings from the overland trucks lay coiled and corrugated by the highwayside like the sloughed and sunblacked hides of old dryland saurians shed along the tarmac roadway there. The wind blew down from the north and then the rain blew down and went gusting in sheets across the road before him.

They were three building of adobe set just off the road that had at one time been a waystation in that country and the roofs were all but gone and most of the vigas carried off. There was an old rusty orange gaspump out front with the glass broken out of the top of it. He led the horse into the largest of the buildings and unsaddled it and stood the saddle in the floor. In one corner was a pile of hay and he kicked at it to loosen it up or perhaps just to see what it might contain. It was dry and dusty and held a depression where something had been sleeping. He went out and walked around behind the building and came back with an old hubcap and poured water in it from the canvas waterbag and held it for the horse to drink. Out through the wrecked wood sash of the windowframe he could see the road shining blackly in the rain.

He got his blankets and spread them in the hay and he was sitting eating sardines out of a tin and watching the rain when a yellow dog rounded the side of the building and entered through the open door and stopped. It looked first at the horse. Then it swung its head and looked at him. It was an old dog gone gray about the muzzle and it was horribly crippled in its hindquarters and its head was askew someway on its body and it moved grotesquely. An arthritic and illjoined thing that crabbed sideways and sniffed at the floor to pick up the man's scent and then raised its head and nudged the air with its nose and tried to sort him from the shadows with its milky half blind eyes.

Billy set the sardines carefully beside him. He could smell the thing in the damp. It stood there inside the door with the rain falling in the weeds and gravel behind it and it was wet and wretched and so scarred and broken that it might have been patched up out of parts of dogs by demented vivisectionists. It stood and then it shook itself in its grotesque fashion and hobbled moaning to the far corner of the room where it looked back and then turned three times and lay down.

He wiped the blade of the knife on his breeches leg and laid the knife across the tin and looked about. He pried a loose clod of mud from the wall and threw it. The dog made a strange moaning sound but it did not move.

Git, he shouted.

The dog moaned, it lay as before.

He swore softly and rose to his feet and cast about for a weapon. The horse looked at him and it looked at the dog. He crossed the room and went out in the rain and walked around the side of the building. When he came back he had in his fist a threefoot length of waterpipe and with it he advanced upon the dog. Go on, he shouted. Git.

The dog rose moaning and slouched away down the wall and limped out into the yard. When he turned to go back to his blankets it dank past him into the building again. He turned and ran at it with the pipe and it scrabbled away.

He followed it. Outside it had stopped at the edge of the road and it stood in the rain looking back. It had perhaps once been a hunting dog, perhaps left for dead in the mountains or by some highwayside. Repository of ten thousand indignities and the harbinger of God knew what. He bent and clawed up a handful of small rocks from the gravel apron and slung them. The dog raised its misshapen head and howled weirdly. He advanced upon it and it set off up the road. He ran after it and threw more rocks and shouted at it and he slung the length of pipe. It went clanging and skittering up the road behind the dog and the dog howled again and began to run, hobbling brokenly on its twisted legs with the strange head agoggle on its neck. As it went it raised its mouth sideways and howled again with a terrible sound. Something not of this earth. As if some awful composite of grief had broke through from the preterite world. It tottered away up the road in the rain on its stricken legs and as it went it howled again and again in its heart's despair until it was gone from all sight and all sound in the night's onset.

HE WOKE in the white light of the desert noon and sat up in the ranksmelling blankets. The shadow of the bare wood windowsash stenciled onto the opposite wall began to pale and fade as he watched. As if a cloud were passing over the sun. He kicked out of the blankets and pulled on his boots and his hat and rose and walked out. The road was a pale gray in the light and the light was drawing away along the edges of the world. Small birds had wakened in the roadside desert bracken and begun to chitter and to flit about and out on the blacktop bands of tarantulas that had been crossing the road in the dark like landcrabs stood frozen at their articulations, arch as marionettes, testing with their measured octave tread the sudden jointed shadows of themselves beneath them.

He looked out down the road and he looked toward the fading light. Darkening shapes of cloud all along the northern rim. It had ceased raining in the night and a broken rainbow or watergall stood out on the desert in a dim neon bow and he looked again at the road which lay as before yet more dark and darkening still where it ran on to the east and where there was no sun and there was no dawn and when he looked again toward the north the light was drawing away faster and that noon in which he'd woke was now become an alien dusk and now an alien dark and the birds that flew had lighted and all had hushed once again in the bracken by the road.

He walked out. A cold wind was coming down off the mountains. It was shearing off the western slopes of the continent where the summer snow lay above the timberline and it was crossing through the high fir forests and among the poles of the aspens and it was sweeping over the desert plain below. It had ceased raining in the night and he walked out on the road and called for the dog. He called and called. Standing in that inexplicable darkness. Where there was no sound anywhere save only the wind. After a while he sat in the road. He took off his hat and placed it on the tarmac before him and he bowed his head and held his face in his hands and wept. He sat there for a long time and after a while the east did gray and after a while the right and godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction.