Against the Day (75 page)

They moved out before dawn, angling
away westward from the railroad and into a gullied and barren plateau, heading
for Sombrérete and the Sierra beyond. Each time they went over a rise, the
pointed ears of the horses in silhouette on the sky, everybody waited for rifle
fire. Behind them after a while a dustcloud appeared.

There was discussion over whether to
stop in Durango, Durango, but it seemed better to press on for the mountains.
About noon the next day, Ewball rode up alongside Frank and directed his
attention down into a little arroyo.

At first Frank took them for
antelope, but they were running faster than he’d ever seen anything run. They
disappeared into a cave in the base of a low cliffside, and Frank, Ewball, and
El Ñato rode over to have a look. Three naked people crouched by the cave
entrance, watching them, not in fear or expectancy, just watching.

“They’re Tarahumares,” El Ñato said.
“They live in caves up north of the Sierra Madre—who knows what they’re
doing down here this far from home?”

“Huerta’s folks ain’t that far back.
You think maybe that’s who these people are running from?”

   
El
Ñato shrugged. “Huerta usually goes after Yaquis or Mayas.”

   
“Well
they’re goners if he catches them,” Frank said.

“Rescuing Indians is the last thing I
need right now. I have my own people to think of.”

Ewball motioned to the three people
to stay back in the cave and out of sight. “You all better keep moving, Ñato,
I’ll see what I can do, catch up with you in a little.”

   
“Crazy
gringo motherfucker,” opined Joaquín the parrot.

Frank and Ewball proceeded up to a
patch of rocks overlooking the valley. Inside often minutes, a line of soldiers
appeared below, tightening, folding, stretching, repeating the motion, like a
disembodied wing against an ashy sky attempting to remember the protocols of
night.

   
Ewball,
humming “La Cucaracha,” set about sighting in.

“Better save our rounds,” it seemed
to Frank, “ain’t much we can do at this range.”

   
“Watch.”

After
the crack, and a second of stillness, down on the valley floor a tiny mounted
figure went lunging backward in the saddle, trying to grab the sombrero that
had just forcefully departed from its head.

   
“Could’ve
been a gust of wind.”

   
“What
do I have to do, start killing them, to get some respect here?”

   
“They
get close enough, they’ll sure try for us.”

The detachment seemed to be in some
confusion, riders going every which way, changing their minds every few
seconds. “Ants in a anthill,” chuckled Ewball. “Here, let’s see if I can just
shoot that rifle out of his hand now
. . . .
”
He chambered another round and fired.

   
“Say,
nice one. When’d you get so good? Mind if I—”

   
“Try
a different angle, give ’em somethin’ to think about.”

Frank was able to get far enough
around in the direction they’d been going to set up a nice crossfire, and eventually,
leaving two or three Mausers behind them, the pursuers turned and made off for
an evening at some fandango saloon in town, if they were lucky.

“Guess I’ll go see to those Indians,”
said Frank. There was more. Ewball, obliging, waited. “Then I’m headin up
north, back the Other Side. Adios Mexico for me. You interested? Or . . .”

Ewball smiled, snorted, indicated
with his head the riders waiting for him, trying to make it look like he had no
choice.
“
Es mi destino, Pancho.
”
Ewball’s horse, impatient, had already begun stepping away.

   
“Well,”
said Frank as if to himself,
“
vaya
con Dios.
”

“
Hasta
lueguito,
”
said
Ewball. They nodded, each touching his hatbrim, turned away.

Frank rode down to where he’d last
seen the party of Indians, and found them in a shallow cave about a half mile
farther up the valley. There were one man and two women, none of them wearing
much in the way of clothing besides red bandannas around their heads.

   
“You
saved our lives,” said the man in Mexican Spanish.

“Me? no,” Frank gesturing vaguely
after the longdeparted
anarquistas.
“But I wanted to make sure you’re
all right, and then I’m on my way.”

   
“Somebody
saved our lives,” said the Indian.

   
“Yes,
but they’re gone now.”

   
“But
you’re here.”

   
“But—”

“You go north. We do, too. Let us go
together for a while. With permission. You may find something you have been
looking for.”

He
introduced himself as El Espinero. “Not my real name—it’s a name the
shabótshi
gave me.” He had demonstrated at an early age a skill for locating water by
examining a random spill of cactus thorns, and he soon became a working
brujo,
gazing into scatterings of thorns and telling people what would happen to
them in the near future, the grammatical tense that mattered most these days
back up in the Sierra.

One of the women was his wife, and
the other her younger sister, whose husband had been taken away and presumed
murdered by the huertistas.

 
“Her
shabótshi
name is Estrella,” said the shaman. He
nodded, a smile beginning. “The name means something to you. She is searching
for a new man now. You saved her life.”

Frank took a look at her. This was a
peculiar place to be reminded so abruptly of the other Estrella, Reef’s
sweetheart back in Nochecita, by now with any luck the mother of a walking,
talking little one. This Tarahumare girl was very young, with a notable great
fall of black hair, big expressive eyes, and a fiery way of using them. Dressed
for the trail, meaning hardly at all, you couldn’t say she was a chore to look
at. But she was not Estrella Briggs either.

“I didn’t save her life,” Frank said,
“the young fellow who really did that rode off a while ago, and I’m not sure we
can find him now.”

“
Qué
toza tienes allá,
”
the girl remarked, pointing at Frank’s penis, which did in fact at the
moment resemble sort of a small—well, mediumsize—log. This was the
first time she’d mentioned him directly. Her sister and El Es

pinero also examined the member, and
then the three of them conferred for a while in their language, though the
laughter was easy to translate.

After a day
and a half’s journey, El Espinero
led Frank to a longabandoned silver working, high over the plain, where nopales
grew and lizards lay in the sun.

Frank understood that he had been
waiting for the unreadable face of the one
duende
or Mexican tommyknocker
who would lead him like this up some slope, higher than the last roofless wall,
into a range of hawks and eagles, take him beyond his need for the light or
wages of day, into some thornscreened mouth, in beneath broken gallowframes and
shoring all askew, allowing himself at last to be swallowed by, rather than
actively penetrating, the immemorial mystery of these mountains—and that
now the moment of subduction had come, he would make no move to prevent it.

Frank had been looking at calcite
crystals for a while now, through Nicol prisms of lab instruments whose names
he’d forgotten, among the chats or zinc tailings of the Lake County mines, down
here in the silver lodes of the Veta Madre and so forth, and he doubted
anything like this piece of spar had ever been seen on Earth, maybe since the
early days up in Iceland itself, yes quite a specimen all right, a twin
crystal, pure, colorless, without a flaw, each identically mirrored half about
the size of a human head and what Ewball would call “of scalenohedral habit.”
And there was this deep glow, though not enough ambient light in here to
account for it—as if there were a soul harbored within.

“Be careful. Look into it, see
things.”

They were deep inside a cavern in the
mountain, yet some queer luminescence in here allowed him to see as
much—Frank couldn’t avoid thinking— as much as he had to.

In the depths of the calcite now,
without waiting too long at all, he saw, or later would say he thought he saw,
Sloat Fresno, and exactly where Sloat had to be. No comparable message about
Deuce, however. A couple years later, when he ran into Ewball again and told
him about this, Ewball would frown, in a slightly mischievous way. “Shouldn’t
it’ve been a little, don’t know, more
spiritual
than that? Deep wisdom, ancient
truth, light from beyond, all that comes of it is one more cantina shooting?
Pretty durn bleak for some magical crystal, ain’t it?”

“What the Indian said was, ’s that
his and the women’s lives got saved, no matter who it was did the
savin—this case you,
compinche
—and that this wasn’t

a real piece of spar so much as the
idea of two twin halves, of balancing out lives and deaths.”

“So you still got two more deaths
comin, one’d be Deuce, and if I could put in a word, the other
should
be
old Huerta, ’cause that sumbitch is still out there makin ever’body’s life
miserable.”

“
Hungry?”
said El Espinero.

Frank looked around and as usual saw
nothing edible for a couple hundred miles’ radius.

   
“See
that rabbit?”

   
“No.”

El Espinero took from his pack and
hefted a sunbleached stick with an elegant warp to it, peered into the
distance, and threw it. “Now do you see it?”

   
“There
it is. How’d you do that?”

“You have fallen into the habit of
seeing dead things better than live ones.
Shabótshi
all do. You need
practice in seeing.”

After they ate, Frank passed around
the last of his smokes. The women went off to smoke in private. El Espinero
reached in his belongings and came out with some kind of vegetarian snack. “Eat
this.”

   
“What
is it?”

   
“
Hikuli.
”

It looked like what up north they
called globe cactus. According to El Espinero, the plant was still alive. Frank
couldn’t recall ever eating something while it was alive.

   
“What’s
it for?”

   
“Medicine.
Cure.”

   
“For
what?”

“For this,” said El Espinero, with an
economical slide of his hand indicating all the visible circumference of the
cruel llano.

It didn’t kick in for a while, but
when it did, Frank was taken out of himself, not just out of his body by way of
some spectacular vomiting but out of whatever else he thought he was, out of
his mind, his country and family, out of his soul.

At some point he found himself in the
air, hand in hand with young Estrella, flying quite swiftly, at low altitude,
over the starlit country. Her hair streaming straight out behind her. Frank,
who had never flown before, kept wanting to turn right or left and go explore
arroyos filled with a liquid, quivering darkness, and tall cactuses and dramas
of predatory pursuit and so forth that now and then seemed also to be glowing
in these peculiar colors,

but the girl, who had flown often, knew where they had to go,
and he understood after a while that she was guiding him, so relaxed and flew
along with her.

Later, on the ground, in fact,
strangely, under it, he found himself wandering a stone labyrinth from one cave
to another, oppressed by a growing sense of danger—each time he chose a
branch, thinking it would lead him out to open air, it only took him deeper,
and soon he was at the edge of panic. “Do not,” said the girl, carefully, calming
him somehow with an inexplicable clarity of touch, “do not be afraid. They want
you to be afraid, but you do not have to give them what they want. You have the
power not to be afraid. Find it, and when you do, try to remember where it is.”
While continuing to be the Tarahumare girl Estrella, she had also at the same
time become Estrella Briggs.

They came to a cave in which it was
raining, calmly but steadily. Inside this one cave, she explained, falling
steadily for thousands of years, was all the rain that should have been falling
on the southwestern desert—vaporous and gray, not from any spring within
the mountain, or from clouds outside directly overhead, but as a result of the
original sin, crime, or mistake that had produced the desert itself
. . . .

“Think not,” Frank objected. “The
desert is something that has evolved over geological time. Not somebody’s
personal punishment.”