The Second Saladin

41

Now Roberto was gone too. Trewitt had seen him die, shot in the lungs at long range.

“May Jesus take his soul,” said Ramirez, crossing himself, “and may He take the soul of that abortion out there with a rifle and telescope and wipe His holy ass with it.”

Trewitt was wedged behind some stunted cripple of what passed for a tree in the higher altitudes of the Sierra del Carrizai. He shivered at the memory of Roberto’s sudden passing, which was — when, yesterday? the day before? And he shivered also for the cold, which was intense, and thought briefly of all the coats he’d owned in his life, nice, solid, American coats, parkas and jackets and tweeds and windbreakers, a whole life written in coats, and now, now when he really needed one, he didn’t have it, didn’t have a goddamned thing.

“Mother of God, this is one fine mess,” said Ramirez. “Jesus, Mr. Gringo, I wish you’d hit that fart in the car.”

Trewitt wished he’d hit him too. He also wished Ramirez hadn’t shot Meza and maybe had talked to “them” — whoever they were. He also wished he wasn’t on this mountain.

A shower of pebbles now descended on him, and he turned to watch the big Mexican slither off. Wearily, Trewitt knew he had to join him. The trick was to keep moving, keep crawling and sliding and hopping from rock to rock and gulch to gulch and knob to knob. They were being stalked by — how many now? Who knew? But bullets came their way often, kicking up vivid little blasts where they hit. Scary as hell. You never knew when it was coming.

At the same time Trewitt was almost beyond caring about moving on. His terror had eaten most of his energy, and his exhaustion had claimed what was left. He bled in a hundred places from assorted cuts, bruises, and nicks. He was rankly filthy and his own odor revolted him. A terrible depression, a sensation of worthlessness, a sense of having once again fulfilled his own lowest expectations of himself haunted him.

You really are no good, Trewitt. You really are a fuck-up. You always were; you always will be.

He watched the Mexican slithering through the rocks like a wily lizard. Something else troubled Trewitt about all this: there was only one way to go, and that was up, but what happened when they got all the way to the top and ran out of mountain?

“We make a stand. Big heroes,” Ramirez said.

“Maybe we ought to try and talk to these guys.”

“Okay. You go talk. Go ahead, be my guest, you go talk.”

“Who are they? How many are there? Is this Kafka?”

Ramirez had no opinion on Kafka. He had no opinion on the identity of his pursuers either. But he thought there were at least five.

This Ramirez was something: totally incurious, totally indifferent to all things beyond himself. Trewitt knew he himself only existed to Ramirez as a kind of pointless but exotic addendum to reality, a kind of minor character good for a page or two in the Cervantes-scale epic of the Mexican’s own thunderous life. A norteamericano — Ramirez despised Americans, but it was nothing personal, for he despised Mexicans as well. He despised everybody, everything: it was a mark of greatness, a symbol of the kind of huge, greedy will that in more primitive times might have made of Ramirez some kind of legend, a Pancho Villa, an Aztec chieftain, a dictator. Or was this Trewitt’s imagination rollercoasting all over the place once again? For on the other hand, the more prosaic hand, Ramirez was just a large, stupid peasant with a peasant’s slyness and hard practical streak.

Yet he was important.

Somehow he fit into a pattern Trewitt could not understand.

He was important enough to kill, which made him important enough to save.

“Hey, Mister Gangster Man. You coming?” the Mexican called in his border English.

Trewitt rolled over and began to squirm up the mountain. At least where he was going there was a view.