Against the Day (180 page)

best we can do is throw dynamite sticks and trust in the
Lord.”

   
“I
could look around. How big of a piece are we talkin?”

   
“Caliber
wouldn’t be as important as mobility, we need something’s easy to break down
and pack around on mules, like you heard of that Krupp mountain gun, somethin
along those lines’d be nice.”

   
She
was taking notes. “Uhhuh, what else?”

“Disinfectant,”
Frank put in, a little feverish today, “as many tank cars of that as you can
find. Plus pain medicine, any kind, laudanum, paregoric, hell, anythin’s got
opium in it, damn country’s in way too much pain.”

   
“Tobacco,”
Ewball added.

After
a while they got into a discussion about Anarchists and their reputation for
rude behavior, such as rolling bombs at people they haven’t been introduced to.

“There’s
plenty of folks who deserve being blown up, to be sure,” opined Ewball, “but
they’ve got to be gone after in a professional way, anything else is being just
like them, slaughterin the innocent, when what we need is more slaughterin of
the guilty. Who gave the orders, who carried ’em out, exact names and
whereabouts—and then go get ’em. That’d be just honest soldiering.”

“Don’t they call that nihilism?”
Stray objected.

“
’Cute, ain’t it? when all the real nihilists are working for the owners, ’cause
it’s them that don’t believe in shit, our dead to them are nothin but dead,
just one more Bloody Shirt to wave at us, keep us doin what they want, but our
dead never stopped belongin to us, they haunt us every day, don’t you see, and
we got to stay true, they wouldn’t forgive us if we wandered off of the trail.”

Frank
hadn’t seen Ewball like this, it was more than drunk tearfulness, Ewb had been
out in this, maybe longer than he thought he’d stay alive for, and over the
years had gathered up, Frank guessed, a considerable number of dead he now felt
were his. Not quite the same as Frank’s twosecond interlude with Sloat Fresno
back down the Bolsón de Mapimí five, no, six years ago. How much had Frank
advanced since then? Deuce Kindred was still out there, maybe still with Lake,
maybe, by now, not.

Next evening
Frank woke up into some long
dissertation Ewball was handing Stray about Anarchosyndicalist theory and
praxis to feel a strangely familiar melancholy in the twilight that he couldn’t
for a minute locate, till down the aisle between the wounded, her small face
warmly illuminated by a cigarette in her mouth, came his favorite backeast girl
anthropologist, Wren Provenance.

   
“Knew
I should’ve went easy on the laudanum tonight,” he greeted her.

Wren was wearing trooper’s boots,
campesino trousers, a man’s shirt a few sizes too large with some buttons
missing, and nothing in the way of underlinen to veil from the casual
onlooker’s gaze her flawless little breasts, though Ewball and Frank,
attempting to be gentlemen about it, were trying not to stare, or at least not
for too long at any one time.

She had been up at Casas Grandes, the
archaeological site just down the road from the recent battle of the same name,
under semiofficial Harvard auspices, studying the mysterious ruins thought to
have been built by refugees fleeing from their mythical homeland of Aztlán up
north.

   
“Thought
you were headed for the South Seas,” Frank said.

   
“Just
not romantic enough there, I guess.”

When Madero and his small army had
arrived here, one by one all her male coworkers, some apologizing over their
shoulders, had fled to avoid being shot.

Stray had been looking her over, with
some interest. “Why didn’t you leave?” she wondered.

“Oh, too busy probably. Loud noises,
flashes of light, no worse than bad weather, one more field condition to work
under—and work’s the thing really.”

“Really. But what are you doing for a
social life, if I’m not being too curious?”

“As the day may provide,” Wren
shrugged, “or not provide. Right now, actually, sleep has emerged as the most
important issue.”

   
“Known
to do that, I guess, ‘emerge.’ Nice Indian bracelet there.”

   
“Jasper
and turquoise. One of the classic Zuñi designs.”

   
“Hmm.
How much’d you pay?”

   
“It
was a gift.”

   
“Travelin
man.”

   
“What
makes you think so?”

   
“Indians
at every train depot west of Denver sell these.”

“Why that twotiming doublecrossing
snake. He made me feel like it was so— I don’t know, special.”

   
“They’re
all like ’at, darlin. Even ol’ Frank here.”

   
“Frank,
shame on you too, then.”

The
ladies were having a swell time. After a while Frank found himself chainsmoking
Stray’s Buen Tonos and trying not to cringe too noticeably. His ribs were
throbbing and he figured he better not laugh too much either, though the way
things were drifting, this was not fixing to be a problem.

In
came a campesino with a message for Stray. She stood, took her field portfolio
and slung it by a strap over her shoulder. “Dealin never stops. Ewball, you
better not go too far, Don Porfirio’s boys might want you back after all.”

   
When
he thought she was out of earshot, Ewball said, “I think she likes me.”

   
“Well
you’re a handsome devil but you sure ain’t no Rodrigo,” it seemed to

Frank.

“You
don’t mind do you compadre, I mean seein’s how it is with you and ol’ Wren
here—”

“You
may have things a little backwards,” Wren through a fixed smile, eyes aglitter.
“But thanks all the same, Ewball, it is just ever such a boost to a maiden’s
selfesteem to find that she is keeping apart two people who ought to be
together, for whom indeed, by every anthropological principle we know to be
valid, it is an unnatural violation of scientific reality
not
to be
together. Tell me, Frank, are you stupid, or blind?”

   
“That’s
the choice, huh
. . . .
Let me think.”

Ewball
waved a beer bottle at Wren. “Answer is ‘stupid.’ Always has been. Care for
another cerveza, there,
tetas de muñeca?
”

   
“Why
yes, that would be so thoughtful of you, there,
pinga de títere.
”

   
“Uhoh,”
said Ewball and Frank in unison.

“
Say,
remember
those little cactuses?”

El Espinero had been sitting there in
the dark for some time, beaming at Frank, eyeballs somehow reflecting more
light than was available. “I apologize for waiting until you ask. But the
hikuli
is not for everyone.”

Had he brought any along? Does the
Easter Rabbit bring colored eggs? Before too long, Frank found himself in a
strange yet familiar City, an outer arc of low warehouses up at the ridgeline,
dropping down to a grid of wide boulevards and canals and open plaza spaces,
down one of which now comes strolling, among the folks on pilgrimage here
streaming in and out of town, an apprentice practitioner who seems to be Frank
himself, as he used to be, before the Broken Days came upon the land and the
people, bearing a small leather pouch containing the sacred Scrolls entrusted
to him the day he left the pigs snuffling in the dust, his mother whispering,
as she handed the bag to him, before he turned and went away down the path,
looking back once, perhaps again, as his sisters at early chores dwindled among
the green hillsides, soon hearing someone playing a reed instrument whose wood
simplicity touches his heart, finding a mule train headed up here to the City,
the line of beasts beginning slowly to switchback up the range in the yellow
sun, which warms and releases the keen smell of bruised cilantro in bales, and
strings of chilies destined for clay pots to be set out on long common tables
in the basements of the City’s Temples, beneath low, roughjoisted ceilings,
shadowed in dark brown, smelling of muskscented hay tracked in from the

lavish pens of the Sacred Peccaries—the string of mules
on this uphill journey bearing also maguey stems just harvested by the
tlachiqueros,
and glossy swampbeaver hides flashing darkly from beneath canvas tiedowns,
to be traded for velvet, gold and silver brocades, giant feathers from very
yellow, red, and green parrots, enormous parrots whose wingspreads darken the
sun, each feather of but a single color, plucked far away at great personal
risk, in a precariousness of stone and windy space, from beneath the birds’
wings as they soar past deploying claws the size of ceremonial lances, in fact
the same feathers as those gathered for the glory of that inner circle of the
priesthood known as the Hallucinati, who enjoy strolling out in groups in the
evenings to impress visitors from the outer districts, or like “Frank” here, up
from the lowlands and beyond, who come flocking in to town just to gaze upon
the promenading hierarchy and their female attendants who have spent hours on
eye adornment, parrotpatterning their orbits in bright yellow with red stripes
and green crescents, with their hair drawn back from sweetly convex childbrows,
sacred girls, some of them beauties celebrated enough to provoke discussion
during muletrain coca breaks, for coffee is not the only stimulant found among
these caravans, where everyone moves and talks at high speed and, like the
mysterious Capital they are bound for, avoids sleeping or even
catnapping—they look forward to some
paseo
time after the factors
have taken delivery, to going out at any hour they like and finding it
impossible to know if it’s even day or night, the City itself being entirely
indoors and nobody but the most senior Astrologers even being allowed to view
the sky. Cafés are open on every street corner, ceremonial maidens gathered
between shifts, dozens to a table, temple gongs and bells contributing their
timbres and rhythms to the urban bustle. “Frank” wanders through it all,
enchanted with everything, stalls selling mangoes and star fruit, agave
fermenting in terracotta bowls,
ristras
of dark purple chilies strung to
dry, pearly green aromatic seeds being crushed in heavy stone mortars,
death’sheads and skeletons of raw sugar which children come running up to buy
with obsidian coins bearing likenesses of notable Hallucinati, and run off
crunching the sweet splintery bones which the dim light in here passes through
as through amber, stalls hung all over with brightlycolored pamphlets,
illustrated, in no inferable arrangement, with narrative caricatures erotic and
murderous, handtinted heliographs in luminescent violets and saffrons and coal
blacks, veined with rust and damp green
. . .
.
He begins to read, or no not exactly read one of these stories
. . . .
It is the tale of The Journey from
Aztlán, and presently he is not so much reading as engaged in a confab with one
of the high priests, finding out this is a city not yet come fully into being,
but right now really just a pausing point of monochrome

adobe, for this gaudy, bright city they hope to find someday,
Frank sees, is being collectively dreamed by the community in their flight, at
their backs a terror not of the earth they thought they knew and respected,
ahead of them, somewhere, a sign to tell them they have truly escaped, have
found their better destiny, in which the eagle would conquer the serpent, the
trespassers, content with what they had seized and occupied of Aztlán, would
give up the pursuit and continue with their own metamorphosis into winged
extraterrestrials or evil demigods or gringos, while the fugitive people would
be spared the dark necessity of buying safety by tearing out the hearts of
sacrificial virgins on top of pyramids and so forth.

At some point he performed a manœuvre
like a bird circling and landing, except in mental space. Standing there
against the light seemed to be Wren, offering him the exact same periodical.
“Brought a little light reading for you.” The text was in no alphabet he’d ever
seen, and he ended up looking at the pictures, erotic and murderous as ever,
illustrating the adventures of a young woman who was called upon repeatedly to
defend her people against misshapen invaders who preferred to fight from the
shadows, and were never clearly shown.

Soon over his shoulder he noticed El
Espinero following along attentively. Finally, “Here, you take it.”

“No, it’s meant for you. So you don’t
forget where you were just now.”

“Since you mention it—” but a
sort of temporal stupor intervened and the
brujo
had vanished. The
“magazine” was now a Mexico City newspaper in black and white from a few days
ago, and there was nothing in it about Casas Grandes, or the battle there.

Stray had grown increasingly
fascinated with Ewball, even though, as she reminded him every chance she got,
he wasn’t really her type. Having been successfully swapped for Rodrigo, whose
family in gratitude had been more than generous about Stray’s fee, there was no
real reason for Ewball to be hanging around here with important Anarchist
business, she was sure, to claim him elsewhere. “Oh I don’t know,” he mumbled,
“sort of vacation I guess. The Revolution’s doing fine on its own, anyway.”