by David Xavier
“When did you grow up?” Salomon asked Vicente. They sat shivering in the pool with their knees breaking the surface.
“I couldn’t help it,” Vicente said. “It happened naturally. I didn’t even try.”
Salomon splashed him one more time. He wiped the water from his face and looked around.
“I think we will not be eating fish this morning.”
They ate nuts and late berries and rode into Santa Barbara and sat for supper in a cantina where a man played guitar in the corner candlelight. In the morning they chased each other down the beach and left footprints in the sand. They shimmied up the palm trees. Salomon dropped coconuts and crouched in the palm leaves with one fist in the air and refused to come down. A strong wind nearly shook his grip free. He came down. They hammered coconuts against different rocks and finally tossed them over their shoulders. They ran with cuffed pants into the surf and the waves chased them back. They buried their feet in sunwarmed sand.
An old woman sat behind folded stacks of her sewing and they bought clothing from her. Salomon wrapped a shawl around Marisela and pulled her close. He told her he would keep her warm, and she smiled and looked away. He threw a serape around his shoulders and held a pose. Marisela pointed.
“Will you continue to carry those?”
Salomon looked down. He still wore the pistolas around his chest, the butts jutting from under his arms.
“No.”
They strolled the streets of Santa Barbara and bought fruit from the vendors who stood in front of short wagons beneath canvas awnings. A boy sold them a newspaper and they sat on a wall of stones overlooking the bay and ate late-season oranges. Salomon pointed to a notice in the newspaper. The Mexican police had chased and killed a man in the Santa Monica Hills. The man’s name was Tiburcio Manuel, a well-known outlaw. There was a renewed effort to rid the land of bandits.
“Even the Mexican officials are in the hunt.”
“Let’s go to your cousin’s rancho,” Marisela said.
“That would be the first place they would look for me.”
“Pío has lots of land. Does he not have a place we can go?”
“My cousins have come to my rescue too many times.”
They continued south. At night they built a fire in a dry wash beneath a stonebuilt bridge and in the morning they ate low-hanging avocadoes in a wet orchard. Dew dripped from the orchard leaves, hung on wire fences and on the tops of long grasses. Bluebirds alternated down the wire in song.
Traveling toward them from the south a scarfed old man driving a one-horse wagon clicked on the wet cobblestones. Salomon nodded to him.
“Fine day.”
“Yes, my friend,” the old man said, reining. “Yes, it is.”
“Are those grapefruits you are hauling?”
“The finest in California. Have one if you are hungry.”
“Thank you, señor. We had plenty this morning. How is the road south?”
The old man held the end of his scarf to Salomon. “My wife made me this scarf.”
Salomon nodded a small smile. “It is brightly colored.”
The old man dropped the fabric and tipped his sombrero back. He propped his foot on the buckboard. “Well, I am only to La Conchita. That is where my orchards are.”
“And how is the road there?”
The old man’s eyes narrowed. “What are you going to La Conchita for?”
“We are going past. Farther south.”
“And you ask how is the road? How do you mean?”
Salomon shrugged. “Dangerous.”
“The road south? It is well-traveled. No, it is not dangerous. It does not flood and it is wash-boarded in only one short area.” The old man nodded.
“I am glad to hear it,” Salomon said. He cleared his throat. “Would you be interested in buying a pair of pistolas?”
The old man straightened. “Where?”
“Right here.” Salomon opened his serape and pulled the leather-wrapped belt with the double pistolas. The old man eyed the bundle.
“What would I need pistolas for?”
“For protection.”
“From what?”
After a short pause Salomon said, “Bandits.”
The old man squinted. “I have not been bothered by bandits. I am an orchard keeper.”
“Then for protection from produce thieves.”
“Only children run through my orchards. I would not shoot one of them.”
“Then just for security. One day you might need a pistola. In case you find trouble.”
“I never look for trouble.”
“In case trouble finds you.”
“I am not expecting any.”
“Then maybe you want to shoot holes in the dirt.” Salomon looked down the road.
“Do what?”
“Have a good day, señor.” He nudged his pony forward.
The orchard keeper turned in his wagon seat and watched them go. He faced ahead and reset his sombrero and snapped the reins. After a short distance he pulled rein and scratched his stubble. He turned again in the wagon seat.
“Amigo.”
Salomon looked back.
“Do you go to church?”
“When I can.”
“Would you like to work in an orchard?”
They lived in a low cottage downhill from the orchard keeper’s stone house. The clink of morning teacups floated from the house windows. Each sunrise shadowed the cottage with the stone house’s long shadow. The sun shone squarely through the house windows like a white coin and lit the dew-sprinkled fruit trees. They rose each day to sweet smells and chirping birds.
Salomon and Vicente chopped at the orchard floor with shorthandled spades and carried buckets from the well. Vicente kept the dragoon’s pistola in his belt.
“You carry that thing everywhere?” Salomon said.
“Everywhere.”
Marisela stood on her toes from tree to tree and gathered basketfuls of grapefruits and oranges, grapes and avocadoes. They pinched grapes from vines as they worked, and Salomon tried to juggle oranges a few times a day for Marisela. The orchard keeper paid them at the end of the months and Marisela put the coins away behind a loose stone in the cottage wall. In the evenings they sat under the trees to watch the sinking sun.
Vicente stood from his spade one morning and wiped a forearm under his sombrero. “I never thought I would grow up to work in an orchard.”
Salomon smiled. He continued to loosen the dirt in a stoop. “I never thought I would get to eat fruit every day.”
Vicente watched him work. “What was it like?”
“Before I got to eat fruit every day?”
“No.”
Salomon stopped in midstroke. He straightened and arched his back. Off in the hillside rows of trees Marisela walked with a basket on her hip. She stopped and searched skyward with her hand shading her eyes, then carried on.
“What was it like in the desert?” Vicente said.
He looked at the ground and toed the dirt, then he looked to Marisela in the distance again. “In the desert,” he said. “It is the worst life imaginable.”
“Why did you do it?”
“I did not realize I was doing it until I was doing it.”
“But you could have stopped.”
“Yes. I could have stopped.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Sometimes you cannot stop a thing once it is started. Sometimes something is taken from you, from this earth. It is something you can touch, something you smell, but it is something inside you that has been taken. Something that you needed to live. Like living without lungs to breathe.”
He watched Marisela hop something in the orchard field and smiled. “It is only when you find that thing again that you are able to breathe once more. It is a deep breath after holding it for so long.”
Vicente twirled the spade point as if he were drilling a tiny hole in the earth. He jabbed several times, then raised his head. “You
would not do it again?”
Salomon looked at him. “I would not try to hold my breath so long.”
In the night she came to him from across the cottage while Vicente lay still. Salomon felt the lightness of her touch and her presence close to him. When he opened his eyes and raised his head she was covered in moonlight at the open door looking back at him. She waited, then ducked under a shawl and went out.
Salomon threw his blanket aside and crossed the tiles to clutch in the doorframe. Outside Marisela crossed with pointed toes over a grassy ditch and paused, raising her head to look back the way a doe in a meadow checks her trail, her hands about her shawl. He sprang from the door and she ran.
She ran down the first row, then turned and crossed through the net of trees, her movement flashing between the rows. She ran with her skirts held at her knees. She had no shoes. Her shawl soon came undone and floated ghostlike behind her. Salomon chased across the orchard lines, catching images of her in midstride like drawings in a flipbook. Then nothing.
He hurried down a row, his feet patting the earth. He found her prints in the dirt, slender feet dotted five times each, as clear and pale as if she had stepped in a cast. He looked around, up and down the row, stooping under the branches. He heard her laugh and turned in time to see the blur of her ankles between the trees.
He ran between the trees and cut against the rows. The trees became neat lines again, like running fingers across envelope tops. He stopped and saw dust from her passage still settling. He could hear his own breathing. A flash in his peripheral turned him and he was again running low through the trees, looking beneath an arm.
At the end of a row he crouched. The orchard was still. When his breathing slowed he saw her tiptoeing from tree to tree. He went to her in a walk and when he was close she turned with one hand on a branch to look across her own shoulder at him. Salomon stopped in step but she did not run. She did not startle or react at all, she just looked at him with her eyes bright under the moon, and stepped away into the tree shadows. He ducked under the branches to the next row over and she came to him there and buried her head on his chest.
“Why did you chase me?” Her voice was a whisper, a faint flicker from her lips.
“Because you ran.”
“Everything runs.”
Salomon held her and smoothed her hair down her back. “I would chase you until the world ran out of land to chase upon.”
She looked up to him. “And how far will they chase you?”
The orchard was still but for a light mist from the treetops.
“Just as far.”
Salomon lowered a fanblade made of six-foot sticks and tied canvas. He sat with his feet dangling off the top of the windmill and fed the rope. With his feet on the ground Vicente tied a new blade and gave the rope two tugs.
From atop the windmill Salomon could see the orchards and fields, the hills rising and falling together in overlaps, and in the far distance, the shimmer of the coast. In one of the fields by the orchards his pony was eating from Marisela’s hand. The pony nosed her face and she drew back with her eyes squeezed shut.
Salomon turned back to his work with a smile and gave the repaired windmill a spin. The sounds of trickling water soon began. The orchard keeper stood peeling an orange when Salomon climbed down.
“If I build ten more of these, I may get to sit down once in a while.”
“We may get to sit down once in a while,” Vicente said.
“You build ten more of these,” Salomon said, “and you can call yourself a windmill builder, not an orchard keeper.”
The orchard keeper nodded, still picking at the orange. “I could build small ones. Ones I could repair just by standing next to them. Ones that could be built in a day.”
“Ones that would fall over the first time the wind blew,” Salomon said.
“I am telling you, Salomon. The world is not kind to the orchard keeper. There are diseases, there are insects, there are fires, there is too much wind, there is not enough wind. There is dust. Too hot, too cold. There are days it does not rain, there are days it floods.”
“These things grow in the wild just fine,” Vicente said.
The orchard keeper had a full mouth. “You go and find them all. You gather them for me and I will pay you what I don’t spend on the orchards. I’ll make you a rich man.”
“I just meant – I don’t know what I meant.”
“You go and plant your orchard seeds and see how difficult it is.”
“What would I do while I wait?” Vicente said.
The orchard keeper looked up from his orange slices, his wet fingers. “You find something else to do, that’s what.”
“This seems like a nice life,” Vicente said. “A life worth all the trouble.”
“It is,” the orchard keeper nodded. “It is worth even more trouble. That is the secret. Find something worth the trouble.”
“You said once you don’t go looking for trouble,” Salomon said. “You said that once.”
“I don’t,” he said. He pointed with an orange slice. “I have all the trouble I want right here.”
The orchard keeper came to his window at sunrise with a coffee in hand. There on the stone wall in the distance sat the shawled young woman overlooking the coast, a small figure upon the winding gray, her face raised to the sea breeze. She pulled her shawl tighter over her head and tucked her hands under her arms, but still she smiled into the breeze. A seagull swooped nearby with black tipped wings curved in gliding flight. She watched it hover and twitch its head. She leaned and picked a yellow flower and tossed its petals to the bird. The petals came falling back on her.
The orchard keeper took a sip and watched. From the orchard trees behind the woman came the man, a stalking figure barefoot. Every few steps he paused and held still. He moved the way an animal approaches prey, with his eyes unmoving and his feet barely touching the earth.
The seagull swooped into the wind and flew off. She put a hand after the trailing bird and her mouth moved in words, requesting the gull to stay. She dropped her hand and turned her face in the breeze. She tossed her head slightly and pushed back a vine of falling hair.
That’s when he pounced.
She jerked her elbows back, her eyes and mouth were wide. Her shawl fell and her hair came alive in the breeze. He sidestepped and held his arms out to reveal his identity. She closed her eyes in laughter and hid her face in her hands.
He sat beside her, straddling the stone wall. The man mimicked the woman’s reaction and she covered her smile again. She slapped his forearm and put a hand to her heart. He spoke to her and reached with both hands to reset her shawl. They sat, his hands moving in conversation. Her smile disappeared.
The man stood from the stone wall and searched a secret place on his clothing. He now held a white blossom with a looped stem. He took one of her hands and knelt before her. His lips moved and she stood with one hand covering her face. He was looking up at her, unmoving upon one knee. She dropped her hand and her eyes were wet.
She nodded.
He twisted the stem round her finger and stood to hold her. They twirled embraced, her feet off the ground. They stood for some time together, her hands around his neck, then he dropped and gathered her in a cradle and they walked with small smiles through the orchard to someplace unseen.
The orchard keeper raised his coffee to the window and toasted the scene and stepped away in a smile.
Vicente shouldered a grain sack down the orchard row to where Salomon stood raking the earth black beneath a dryrotting tree. He hurried the last few steps and the sack dropped and fell over and Vicente put his hands to his knees, breathing hard.
“There is a wheelbarrow,” Salomon said. “In the stone shed.”
Vicente looked up and held his breath. He dropped his head shaking. “When were you going to tell me that?”
Salomon grinned. “Here.”
He handed Vicente the rake and took up the grain sack. He held it agains
t his hip with one arm, one hand grasping the neck, and shook manure upon the base of the next tree. As the sack became lighter he held it high with one hand until it emptied in a fine swirling dust. He shook the sack out and looked up. Vicente was squinting into the downwind. He leaned and spat, not taking his glare from Salomon.
“I’ll get the water this time,” Salomon said.
He pulled two buckets from the well and walked them sloshing heavy at his sides. He stopped and looked to the road. The faint sounds of horse hoofs. He walked further and stopped again. A patrol of twelve US Cavalry trotting southbound appeared. Salomon lowered the buckets.
The patrol looked road weary, slumped and bickering. They stopped at the crossroads and stepped in place. One man shouted orders to the others like the grunts of a deaf and he jabbed a finger at the orchard house. Two of the horsemen split from the group and came up the orchard road in a quarreling walk then silence upon their scowls.
The orchard keeper came from his door with his fingers in a dishrag and waited. Salomon eased toward the stone cottage, keeping his eyes on the horsemen, then turned and ran downhill with arms bouncing overhead at each jump. He stopped himself with his hands against the door, then disappeared inside and crouched at the window.
“What is it?”
Salomon turned. Marisela was there against the wall, her hand on her cheek.
“Get down.”
“Are they here for you?”
The cavalrymen dismounted and spat and approached the orchard keeper. One of them did the speaking, moving his hands about his face in description. The orchard keeper shook his head. The cavalryman spoke again and held his hand at head level. The orchard keeper shook his head again and pointed the dishrag downroad.
