I hurried into the cool refuge of the tackroom. Rose’s Daddy sat with his feet atop the old gun-colored desk, the whiskey bottle near him uncorked and near full, the ceiling fan whirlybirding overhead. He opened a red pouch of full aroma, tamped a wad into his pipebowl, struck a match, and lit the amphora, watching me through the flame as he toked. I stood there catching my breath and getting my awares, the ceiling fan whorling the blossom of chocolate-and-cherry tobacco about the room. You could smell a parched-earth smell just below the layer of sweet cavendish—dirt that had been whisked in by the wind and tramped in by bootsole, air that carried the aroma of the manure of animals and the sweat of men, the pungency of creosote, the spiciness of sage and rue. The heat held too the odor of worn horse blankets, the hemp of rope, the tannin of leather, and the soaps and waxes and creams used to clean and polish and nourish the hides—smells that would seep into wood and adobe and memory.
You’ve not ridden the paint lately, the old man had said.
I was on him just the other day.
You need to be working him around those barrels every day.
I suppose.
You suppose.
A hot wind came through the iron bars of the window like a furnace on.
What’s with Son and that gun? I said.
Nervous tension it seems, he said, shaking his head.
He’s making me nervous.
Don’t be, Girl, he said. And too, do not weary yourself to brood over not having that foal. I can see you have been let down. We may give it another go-round, but a man can only promise as best he can.
It’s not that.
What be it, then?
Rose’s Daddy’s words were stirred up with the buzz of horseflies overhead. He would go on with his talk. My mind would go off toward other things. I probably thought about how the hot would blow at least until twilight. I probably saw a darkness thick with dust settling in as usual, leaving the sky moonless and without stars. I probably thought about Son, where he went and hid at night, what he did. There was never a day anymore I wouldn’t get a queasiness in my stomach about this.
Girl, if you be dismayed at not having the stallion here of late you can surely head yonder to Pearl and Ham’s habitation, Rose’s Daddy said. I doubt they would mind a lick if you were to go over there and visit Holy Roller. He raised his eyebrows and looked at me, the smoke of his pipe drifting in ropy loops about the room. I keep forgetting you are yet hardly grown from a child, he said. Nonetheless, you ought to stop sulking. We do not go in for mollycoddling of any kind around here.
I swatted at the tangle and drone of pests above my head and turned to head out the door just as Son was coming in. He ducked some to keep his hat from hitting the lintel and wielded his weapon ahead of him, his silver belt buckle aglitter like a shield and the dust pluming from his bootheels, as if he were some kind of hero from ancient times, one of those men of Greek or Roman myths that would leave imprints in the sky. He settled the gun atop the rack on the wall and turned to me.
Hey, he said.
Hey what? I said.
Enough fooling around out there, Rose’s Daddy said. Hereafter we need to be in league and get to working at getting after that rodeo dough. Before we cannot afford to bring any more groceries in. Before we cannot afford to bring nor anything in. Before we cannot keep on with what is important. Before we are lost of all substance. He knocked the pipe against the desk and a dottle of burnt tobacco fell out of the bowl to the floor. He stamped on the smoldering plug and booted it across the room. We shall not be smote by the heat, he said. Now let us get a get-go.
I went out and watched Son that day, watched the way he uncoiled the rope and laid it out, working the loop over his head easy and loose so to warm his arm up. He threw the first toss out, snagging the bull’s horn by a single. He drew the rope back, coiled it up, and lofted it once more, getting both horns this time. He went through all the moves again and again, his face worked into a twisted manner of concentration, roping until he was doubling consistently. After a while he changed his aim and pitched the lariat over a parceled-up bale of hay. When he had had enough of this, he started going for whatever he might have been able to get the noose around. He lasso’d the fenceposts, the legs of a table, a rusted-out barrel and keg, the mailbox and toolbox, the watertruck bumper, a tractor seat. He had me run from him so he could run after me, going for my head and reeling me in by the waist after the catch. He let me loose only to go after both my feet, all but tripping me, and I hollered at him to stop while he was bent over laughing. Then he turned and threw a loop over the head of the old dog, choking back on the rope and making her struggle and rasp.
Just horsin’, he said.
A LONESOME DAMSELFLY danced about in search of a way out. I walked through a room of looping morning glories and latticed fencing papering the walls. A pot of beans simmered atop the stove, and over on the sill of the window, a jar of suntea steeped. There were vitamin and iron pills on the countertop, a water glass half-filled, a tube of handcream, a pile of grocery receipts, recipe clippings, shopping lists, doctor bills, gas and electric bills, telephone bills, other kinds of bills. A large mason jar held something dried and crumbled inside, an odd concoction of things—spurs of bursage, wool of horsebrush, hairs of wormwood, florets of snakeweed, is what the handwriting on the label said—fixings meant for a bruja’s stew, you would think. I looked through the window and saw Rose, stooped in the dirt in what was left of the garden. There was her broad-brimmed straw yet hung on the peg on the wall on my way out. I reached for the hat and opened the door, the damselfly flying past in its droning escape.
The sere of the day hit like the slap the door made. Rose startled and looked back at the noise and at me coming out. Then she went back to busying herself with what she had been doing, tending to what she said was a onetime prizewinning and now dying polyantha. Rose was slender and silvery and delicate as a kit fox would be. Her hair was sprung from its coil of braid and caught in a fuzzy halo of light about her scalp. The sun burned straight above, through a gauzing of dust.
You forgot your hat, I said.
She touched her head to check. I forgot I was only going to be out here for a minute, she said. She took the big-brimmed straw from me and put it on.
I used a salute held to my forehead to keep the sun in check.
Where’s yours? she said.
I’m only out for a minute too, I said.
Rose tapped at a dried stalk with her pruning shears. An old garden rose, she said, meant more for hardiness than for showiness, though no less the beautiful because of it. Yet now look at the fallen clusters. Look here at the shriveled petals. Deary me, all the many scorched leaves. These cankered stems, she said.
She reached a hand out, the skin lichened and thinned, and I pulled her up, light as a sack full of dried mesquite beans would be. I asked her if she might like to make a visit with me out to Pearl Hart’s place today, uneasy as I was going alone, but Rose complained of being weary. You go on, she said, and give Pearl my betters. She brushed the dirt from her skirt and her knees and she blew the loose hairs away from her face. She straightened her back up, rolled the hunch from her shoulders out, then rearranged the broad straw hat. And I wondered if it was forgiving or forgetting that allowed Rose her generosity, if it was one or the other or both that gave her such uprightness, such fineness, such grace.
THE HOUSE IS a two-story pink stucco built in the mission style, with quatrefoil windows and arched dormers and roof parapets, set amid acres of mixed irrigated and riparian land that runs alongside the dwindling river. The grounds that surround it are a place of shade, a refuge of desert olive and eucalyptus and paloverde, with light strobing through the masses of branches and shoots and through the crowns and the blades of leaves, light so pale and flickering it’s hard to tell sky from sand from what water there is yet in the river. The watertruck chugs along through the trees, down a long driveway rowed with date palms, the drooping thatches scratching ple
adingly at the tank roof. I clutch and brake at the gatehouse, where a Mexican man in a khaki uniform of sorts stops me to question me. He picks a receiver up and speaks my name into it. He nods his head and comes out of the gatehouse and slides the latch back. He wings the wrought-iron gates apart, drawing one open, then going over across to the other side to draw the other back. He raises a hand in gesture and lets me drive through and on past.
It’s Pearl’s daughter who answers the front door of the pink stucco house, Pearl’s daughter who does not smile in her hello, nor does she look at my eyes to invite me in—the daughter who says no word to me as she leads me through the long dark entryway, moving as if she were bored by this chore, moving as if she is aware of her prettiness too, with her mother’s fine skin and straight even teeth, with breasts full beneath her sheer camisa as any man would want them, her hair styled exactly right as to the style of the times, and her legs lean and fine and tanned for the sake of fashion and others’ eyes. She takes me out to an inner courtyard where her mother is sipping tea with the Padre in the spiny shade of an ocotillo. A large fountain sits dry in the middle of the courtyard—a cherub holding an urn between its hands, any water that should be flowing out from it now only in imagining. Brittle leaves and tiny lizards skitter over the pebbles at the fountain’s base and over the stone toes of the cherub. A bowl of tangelos sits brimful on the table. Pearl’s daughter reaches for the fruit, sticks a thumb into the skin of one, letting the juice of it run down her wrist. She licks the trickle to a finish.
I’m going into town for a while, she says.
Back by suppertime, her mother says.
The daughter holds a peg of tangelo up to her lips, either to hide her smile or maybe to be silly, thinking it charming. She says her good-byes to the Padre and says how she’s glad to see him and will he come back soon again for another visit. She speaks with her back to me, leaves without a further good-bye of any kind.
Pearl gestures a hand to the empty chair next to her and says, Please. I take a seat, my heart fluttering like the hummingbird does about the phlox potted at our sides. She opens a nacre-inlaid box and takes a slender cigar out, and when she offers me one, I thank her, no. The Padre reaches for the upright silver lighter on the table and he thumbs a flame and extends the light toward Pearl’s face. She looks him directly in the eye as she draws the fire in. She takes her time, as if drawing the Padre in too. She inhales and turns to me, offers me a glass of iced tea, and as I’m declining she’s filling the tumbler up anyway. I tell her I had come by not to waste any of her time but to pay a visit to Holy Roller. She tells me I’ve come none too soon, as tomorrow all the thoroughbreds will be trailered up to mountain country and they won’t be brought back again until the drought comes to an end.
If it ever comes to an end, she says.
Where is your faith? the Padre says.
I’m counting on you, she says.
I defer to higher powers, he says. But you will be helping me draw upon these powers along with the others at the next prayer meeting. He stands and places a hand on Pearl’s shoulder. Please, don’t get up. I can see myself to the door. He turns my way and says he would be happy to escort me out to the stables.
Pearl draws on her cigarillo and nods.
The Padre leads me back through the long entryway of thick stucco walls and out the double wooden doors, as if he already knew the place well. The way to the stables takes us through a grove of tangerine trees, along a path shilled with sunlight and dapples of shadow, the fruit on the trees ripe and gleaming like jewelry, so tempting the picking. We walk in silence, and I wait for words to surface, hoping for the right something to say.
Won’t you get dirty? I’m already wishing away what I said.
He stops and looks himself over, dressed as he is all in white linen—a long shirt that hangs about to his knees, and underneath, white linen pajama-like pants. His toes protrude from the hem, and the nakedness of his feet is embarrassing, too out of place as they are in this place, or something.
This is Indian garb, he says. Desert wear. Indian men wear such clothes every day and everywhere, and surely they don’t worry much about getting dirty, he says, as such items are properly washed. As are feet, he says.
Not the Yumas or the Pimas, I say. Not the Quechans either. I’ve not seen them dressed in white cotton pajamas, young or old, no matter the fashion or the tribe.
His eyes. There are glints of light in the violet of the irises.
No, he says. India’s Indians.
I feel the heat rise in my face.
He laughs softly, graciously, tossing his head back.
You’ll need shoes. Or a tetanus shot, either one, I say, thinking this not funny enough after I’ve said it.
He lifts his cuffs to show me his sandals.
Those should do, but they’ll raise eyebrows in town, I say.
You’re probably right, he says. Anyway, I’m not going all the way to the stables. I just thought to walk you partway. Pearl would have had me at the house with her the rest of the afternoon. And I’ve got a sermon needing to be written before morning.
That’s something, writing a sermon.
I could use some inspiration today, he says. He tilts his head back and looks up toward the sun. The rage of heaven’s eye, he says. This weather would put any soul to the test.
Maybe you’ve got a few Indian chants to bring on the rain?
Come to our prayer meeting next week and find out.
I would. But I’m not a religious person.
I see you otherwise.
The idea of a man up in the sky doesn’t really fit right with me.
Nor with me, he says.
But I liked what you talked about in church the day I came, I say. It didn’t sound like the usual, you know, the usual stuff. Though I don’t know how I would know what the usual is.
Come by my office and we can talk more, he says. Come some morning. Or afternoon. Come anytime. Would you?
The Padre reaches a hand out and I take it, thinking it like the first time I had shaken his hand, that time in line with the others on the way out of the church, when we said our hellos and he looked right into me the way he looks right into me today.
There’s a buffet of wind as we say our so-longs.
You hear that? he says.
Hear what?
The fretful weather, he says, it may be about to change.
WE LOPED THE horses for a stretch down the canalbank, breaking them down to a trot before they had a chance to froth or begin to wheeze. By the time we were back to the stables, they were ribboned with sweat, even walking them back easily and coming into the lessening heat of evening. We watered them well and led them into the arena, where the hired man had already gotten the pens filled with the cows. Now he used a hotshot to filter the bunch through the chutes, most of them being too hot and too stubborn to move. But when he prodded the rumps and let the current buzz through, this jumped each, one by one, ahead and quick.
The horses waited in ready at the end gate.
My eyes were on Son. I waited for him to give me the nod, and when he did I opened the gate latch and leapt back and let the cow burst out. Son took off across the line on the sorrel, and Rose’s Daddy came pounding out but seconds behind. The sorrel ran strong as Son looped the rope high overhead and caught up just the right distance from the calf. He swung the rope and dropped it on over the horns, then jerked it back and dallied, choking the rope up on the cow’s neck, the sorrel knowing to backstep to keep the rope stretched tight. The cow bawled and snotted as the bay came up for the heels, Rose’s Daddy swinging his lariat but snagging just the one hoof. The old man tied on hard and fast, and the horses pranced backward both ways—both good working horses, stretching the ropes out and bringing the calf down, pulling it out long and taut, stiffening it the way it will hang after butchering, with the tongue and the eyes bulged out. Son dropped from his saddle and loosened the heel rope, then took his own rope from the horns. Get bo
th of ’em next time, he said to the old man. And they roweled their horses around and trotted back to the chutes and got ready to rope another cow down, one more time and then another time and over and over again.
ROSE’S DADDY WILL talk often of the days of water aplenty. He will talk of the team of hired men he once had, telling of their numbers and abilities, their eating habits and their drinking ways, their women and dogs, their children. He will talk about the foreman he had to do most of the work for him, another man he had hired to care just for the horses, a woman who would come to teach Rose to ride English each morning and evening. There was a new swimming pool put in, and a coach hired to teach Son how to high-dive and win medals. There were cooks hired to feed everyone kept hungry because of the lemon picking and the melon loading and the riding and the diving that was done. There was a driver hired to drive the cars for the old man and Rose on bridge nights and on going-out-to-dinner nights and on bright-lit rodeo nights.
There were stars out brilliant and beyond reckoning, he will say.
Rose will talk of the days there was water enough for all the roses she had planted and trained and proudly shown.
We had water enough for a prizewinning garden of roses, she will say, all of them bordered and bedded and pruned to bloom one to follow yet after another. We had flushes of ramblers rambling out over the fencepost and wild climbers reaching up over the portico. There were whites and creams shrubbed along the walkway and particolors in clay pots to add cheer out by the poolside. There were sweetbriars and hybrid teas that made a picture of the kitchen window. There were weepers clinging to the porch beams.
Now Rose wipes the dust from her eyes. She has just come home after having been a few days at the coast. She has parked the sedan under the dying branches of an old pecan tree and left the car clacking and pinging in a state of overheating. A roadrunner clucks from the bitterbrush. The sun hangs at its zenith.
Old Border Road Page 10
