He pushed open the door. Bud? he said. Bud?
He walked into the bedroom.
Bud?
There was no one there. He went out and called and waited and called again. He went back in and opened the stove door. A fire was laid with stovechunks and kindling and newsprint. He shut the door and went out. He called but no one answered. He mounted up and gave the horse its head and kneed it forward but it only wanted to set out across the creek and back down the road again.
He turned and rode back and waited at the little house for an hour but no one came. By the time he got back to the ranch it was almost midnight.
He lay on his bunk and tried to sleep. He thought he heard the whistle of a train in the distance, thin and lost. He must have been sleeping because he had a dream in which the dead girl came to him hiding her throat with her hand. She was covered in blood and she tried to speak but she could not. He opened his eyes. Very faintly he had heard the phone ring in the house.
When he got to the kitchen Socorro was on the phone in her robe. She gestured wildly at Billy. Si, si, she said. Si, joven. Esperate.
HE WOKE COLD and sweating and raging with thirst. He knew that it was the new day because he was in agony. When he moved the crusted blood in his clothes cracked about him like ice. Then he heard Billy's voice.
Bud, he said. Bud.
He opened his eyes. Billy was kneeling over him. Behind him the boy was holding back the cloth and outside the world was cold and gray. Billy turned to the boy. Andale, he said. Rapido. Rapido.
The curtain fell. Billy struck a match and held it. You daggone fool, he said. You daggone fool.
He reached down the stub of a candle in its saucer from the shelf nailed to the crate and lit the candle and held it close. Aw shit, he said. You daggone fool. Can you walk?
Dont move me.
I got to.
You couldnt get me across the border noway.
The hell I cant.
He killed her, bud. The son of a bitch killed her.
I know.
The police are huntin me.
JC's bringin the truck. We'll run the goddamn gate if we have to.
Dont move me, bud. I aint goin.
The hell you aint.
I cant make it. I thought there for a while I could. But I cant.
Just take it easy now. I aint listenin to that shit. Hell, I've had worse scratches than that on my eyeball.
I'm cut all to pieces Billy.
We'll get you back. Dont quit on me now, goddamn it.
Billy. Listen. It's all right. I know I aint goin to make it.
I done told you.
No. Listen. Whew. You dont know what I'd give for a cool drink of water.
I'll get it.
He started to set the candle by but John Grady took hold of his arm. Dont go, he said. Maybe when the boy gets back.
All right.
He said it wouldnt hurt. The lyin son of a bitch. Whew. It's gettin daylight, aint it?
Yeah.
I seen her, bud. They had her laid out and it didnt look like her but it was. They found her in the river. He cut her throat, bud.
I know.
I just wanted him. Bud, I wanted him.
You should of told me. You didnt have no business comin down here by yourself.
I just wanted him.
Just take it easy. They'll be here directly. You just hang on.
It's okay. Hurts like a sumbitch, Billy. Whew. It's okay.
You want me to get that water?
No. Stay here. She was so goddamned pretty, bud.
Yes she was.
I worried about her all day. You know we talked about where people go when they die. I just believe you go someplace and I seen her layin there and I thought maybe she wouldnt go to heaven because, you know, I thought she wouldnt and I thought about God forgivin people and I thought about if I could ask God to forgive me for killin that son of a bitch because you and me both know I aint sorry for it and I reckon this sounds ignorant but I didnt want to be forgiven if she wasnt. I didnt want to do or be nothin that she wasnt like goin to heaven or anything like that. I know that sounds crazy. Bud when I seen her layin there I didnt care to live no more. I knew my life was over. It come almost as a relief to me.
Hush now. They aint nothin over.
She wanted to do the right thing. That's got to count for somethin dont it? It did with me.
It does with me too.
There's a pawnshop ticket in the top of my footlocker. If you wanted to you could get my gun out and keep it.
We'll get it out.
There's thirty dollars owin on it. There's some money in there too. In a brown envelope.
Dont worry about nothin now. Just take it easy.
Mac's ring is in that little tin box. You see he gets it back. Whew. Like a sumbitch, bud.
You just hang on.
We got the little house lookin good, didnt we?
Yes we did.
You reckon you could keep that pup and kindly look after him?
You'll be there. Dont you worry now.
Hurts, bud. Like a sumbitch.
I know it. You just hang on.
I think maybe I'm goin to need that sup of water.
You just hang on. I'll get it. I wont be a minute either.
He set the candlestub in its saucer of grease on the shelf and backed out and let the curtain fall. As he trotted out across the vacant lot he looked back. The square of yellow light that shone through the sacking looked like some haven of promise out there on the shore of the breaking world but his heart misgave him.
Midblock there was a small cafe just opening. The girl setting up the little tin tables started when she saw him there, wild and sleepless, the knees of his breeches red with blood where he'd knelt in the bloodsoaked mat.
Agua, he said. Necesito agua.
She made her way to the counter without taking her eyes off him. She took down a tumbler and filled it from a bottle and set it on the counter and stepped back.
No hay un vaso mas grande? he said.
She stared at him dumbly.
Dame dos, he said. Dos.
She got another glass and filled it and set it out. He put a dollar bill on the counter and took the glasses and left. It was gray dawn. The stars had dimmed out and the dark shapes of the mountains stood along the sky. He carried the glasses carefully one in each hand and crossed the street.
When he got to the packingcrate the candle was still burning and he took the glasses both in one hand and pushed back the sacking and crouched on his knees.
Here you go, bud, he said.
But he had already seen. He set the waterglasses slowly down. Bud, he said. Bud?
The boy lay with his face turned away from the light. His eyes were open. Billy called to him. As if he could not have gone far. Bud, he said. Bud? Aw goddamn. Bud?
Aint that pitiful, he said. Aint that the most goddamn pitiful thing? Aint it? Oh God. Bud. Oh goddamn.
When he had him gathered in his arms he rose and turned. Goddamn whores, he said. He was crying and the tears ran on his angry face and he called out to the broken day against them all and he called out to God to see what was before his eyes. Look at this, he called. Do you see? Do you see?
The Sabbath had passed and in the gray Monday dawn a procession of schoolchildren dressed in blue uniforms all alike were being led along the gritty walkway. The woman had stepped from the curb to take them across at the intersection when she saw the man coming up the street all dark with blood bearing in his arms the dead body of his friend. She held up her hand and the children stopped and huddled with their books at their breasts. He passed. They could not take their eyes from him. The dead boy in his arms hung with his head back and those partly opened eyes beheld nothing at all out of that passing landscape of street or wall or paling sky or the figures of the children who stood blessing themselves in the gray light. This man and his burden passed on forever out of that nameless crossroads an
d the woman stepped once more into the street and the children followed and all continued on to their appointed places which as some believe were chosen long ago even to the beginning of the world.
EPILOGUE
HE LEFT three days later, he and the dog. A cold and windy day. The pup shivering and whining until he took it up in the bow of the saddle with him. He'd settled up with Mac the evening before. Socorro would not look at him. She set his plate before him and he sat looking at it and then rose and walked down the hallway leaving it untouched on the table. It was still there when he went out through the kitchen again ten minutes later for the last time and she was still there at the stove, bearing on her forehead in ash the thumbprint of the priest placed there that morning to remind her of her mortality. As if she had any thought other. Mac paid him and he folded the money and put it in his shirtpocket and buttoned it.
When are you leavin?
In the mornin.
You dont have to go.
I dont have to do nothin but die.
You wont change your mind?
No sir.
Well. Nothin's forever.
Some things are.
Yeah. Some things are.
I'm sorry Mr Mac.
I am too, Billy.
I should of looked after him better.
We all should of.
Yessir.
That cousin of his got here about a hour ago. Thatcher Cole. Called from town. He said they finally got hold of his mother.
What did she have to say?
He didnt say. He said they hadnt heard from him in three years. What do you make of that?
I dont know.
I dont either.
Are you goin to San Angelo?
No. Maybe I ought to. But I aint.
Yessir. Well.
Let it go, son.
I'd like to. I think it's goin to be a while.
I think so too.
Yessir.
Mac nodded toward his blue and swollen hand. You dont think you ought to get somebody to look at that?
It's all right.
You've always got a job here. The army's goin to take this place, but we'll find somethin to do.
I appreciate that.
What time will you be leavin?
Early of the mornin.
You told Oren?
No sir. Not yet.
I reckon you'll see him at breakfast.
Yessir.
But he didnt. He rode out in the dark long before daylight and he rode the sun up and he rode it down again. In the oncoming years a terrible drought struck west Texas. He moved on. There was no work in that country anywhere. Pasture gates stood open and sand drifted in the roads and after a few years it was rare to see stock of any kind and he rode on. Days of the world. Years of the world. Till he was old.
In the spring of the second year of the new millennium he was living in the Gardner Hotel in El Paso Texas and working as an extra in a movie. When the work came to an end he stayed in his room. There was a television set in the lobby and men his age and younger sat in the lobby in the evening in the old chairs and watched the television but he cared little for it and the men had little to say to him or he to them. His money ran out. Three weeks later he was evicted. He'd long since sold his saddle and he set forth into the street with just his AWOL bag and his blanketroll.
There was a shoe repair place a few blocks up the street and he stopped in to see if he could get his boot fixed. The shoeman looked at it and shook his head. The sole was paper thin and the stitching had pulled through the leather. He took it to the rear and sewed it on his machine and returned and stood it on the counter. He wouldnt take any money for it. He said it wouldnt hold and it didnt.
A week later he was somewhere in central Arizona. A rain had come down from the north and the weather turned cool. He sat beneath a concrete overpass and watched the gusts of rain blowing across the fields. The overland trucks passed shrouded in rain with the clearance lights burning and the big wheels spinning like turbines. The east-west traffic passed overhead with a muted rumble. He wrapped himself in his blanket and tried to sleep on the cold concrete but sleep was a long time coming. His bones hurt. He was seventy-eight years old. The heart that should have killed him long ago by what the army's recruiting doctors had said still rattled on in his chest, no will of his. He pulled the blankets about him and after a while he did sleep.
In the night he dreamt of his sister dead seventy years and buried near Fort Sumner. He saw her so clearly. Nothing had changed, nothing faded. She was walking slowly along the dirt road past the house. She wore the white dress her grandmother had sewn for her from sheeting and in her grandmother's hands the dress had taken on a shirred bodice and borders of tatting threaded with blue ribbon. That's what she wore. That and the straw hat she'd gotten for Easter. When she passed the house he knew that she would never enter there again nor would he see her ever again and in his sleep he called out to her but she did not turn or answer him but only passed on down that empty road in infinite sadness and infinite loss.
He woke and lay in the dark and the cold and he thought of her and he thought of his brother dead in Mexico. In everything that he'd ever thought about the world and about his life in it he'd been wrong.
Toward the small hours of the morning the traffic on the freeway slacked and the rain stopped. He sat up shivering and hitched the blanket about his shoulders. He'd put some crackers from a roadside diner in the pocket of his coat and he sat eating them and watching the gray light flush out the raw wet fields beyond the roadway. He thought he heard the distant cries of cranes where they would be headed north to their summering grounds in Canada and he thought of them asleep in a flooded field in Mexico in a dawn long ago, standing single-footed in the wetlands with their bills tucked, gray figures aligned in rows like hooded monks at prayer. When he looked across the overpass to the far side of the turnpike he saw another such as he sitting also solitary and alone.
The man raised his hand in greeting. He raised his back.
Buenos dias, the man called.
Buenos dias.
Que tiene de comer?
Unas galletas, nada mas.
The man nodded. He looked away.
Podemos compartirlas.
Bueno, called the man. Gracias.
Alli voy.
But the man stood. I will come to you, he called.
He descended the concrete batterwall and crossed the roadway and climbed over the guardrail and crossed the median between the round concrete pillars and crossed the northbound lanes and climbed up to where Billy was sitting and squatted and looked at him.
It aint much, Billy said. He pulled the remaining few packages of crackers from his pocket and held them out.
Muy amable, the man said.
Esta bien. I thought at first you might be somebody else.
The man sat and stretched out his legs before him and crossed his feet. He tore open a package of the crackers with his eyetooth and took one out and held it up and looked at it and then bit it in two and sat chewing. He wore a wispy moustache, his skin was smooth and brown. He was of no determinable age.
Who did you think I might be? he said.
Just somebody. Somebody I sort of been expectin. I thought I caught a glimpse of him once or twice these past few days. I aint never got all that good a look at him.
What does he look like?
I dont know. I guess more and more he looks like a friend.
You thought I was death.
I considered the possibility.
The man nodded. He chewed. Billy watched him.
You aint are you?
No.
They sat eating the dry crackers.
Adonde vas? Billy said.
Al sur. Y tu?
Al norte.
The man nodded. He smiled. Que clase de hombre comparta sus galletas con la muerte?
Billy shrugged. What kind of death would eat them?
What kind indeed, sai
d the man.
I wasnt tryin to figure anything out. De todos modos el compartir es la ley del camino, verdad?
De veras.
At least that's the way I was raised.
The man nodded. In Mexico on certain days of the calendar it is the custom to set a place at the table for death. But perhaps you know this.
Yes.
He has a big appetite.
Yes he does.
Perhaps a few crackers would be taken as an insult.
Perhaps he's got to take what he can get. Like the rest of us.
The man nodded. Yes, he said. That could be.
Traffic had picked up on the turnpike. The sun was up. The man opened the second package of crackers. He said that perhaps death took a larger view. That perhaps in his egalitarian way death weighed the gifts of men by their own lights and that in death's eyes the offerings of the poor were the equal of any.
Like God.
Yes. Like God.
Nadie puede sobornar a la muerte, Billy said.
De veras. Nadie.
Nor God.
Nor God.
Billy watched the light bring up the shapes of the water standing in the fields beyond the roadway. Where do we go when we die? he said.
I dont know, the man said. Where are we now?
The sun rose over the plain behind them. The man handed him back the last remaining packet of crackers.
You can keep em, Billy said.
No quieres mas?
My mouth's too dry.
The man nodded, he pocketed the crackers. Para el camino, he said. I was born in Mexico. I have not been back for many years.
You goin back now?
No.
Billy nodded. The man studied the coming day. In the middle of my life, he said, I drew the path of it upon a map and I studied it a long time. I tried to see the pattern that it made upon the earth because I thought that if I could see that pattern and identify the form of it then I would know better how to continue. I would know what my path must be. I would see into the future of my life.
How did that work out?
Different from what I expected.
How did you know it was the middle of your life?
I had a dream. That was why I drew the map.
What did it look like?
The map?
Yes.
It was interesting. It looked like different things. There were different perspectives one could take. I was surprised.
Could you remember all the places you'd been?
Oh yes. Couldnt you?