In a room kept dark against the glare, a man sat in a canvas chair behind the bar. He stared blindly at the sour walls, as if permanently ready to do business but unwilling to solicit it. The only sound was a raw, discordant clanging of a loose tin sheet upon the roof, the only movement dust in the bright doorway. For a moment, Miller imagined him carved of wood, but at the tip of a brown cigarette stub in the center of his mouth was a small glow.
“Buenos días,” he said.
The proprietor’s answer was a soft tentative whispering, scarcely audible above the clanging of the tin. Asking for a beer, Miller whispered, too. In answer, the man reached behind him into a black vat of water, drawing out a bottle with no label. He held it at arm’s length like a trophy, the stale water sliding down his wrist. The vat, roiled by his hand, gave off a fetid odor.
“All right,” said Miller. “Sí.”
He turned to locate the two boys. The older one stood outside the doorway, but the other was not in sight. Miller waved at the first to enter, but the boy did not stir. The proprietor, glimpsing him for the first time, glanced at Miller. Miller took the tepid beer and requested two bottles of soda. The man held up two fingers, raised his eyebrows. “There’s another outside,” Miller explained. He awaited the warm bottles, then walked quickly to the door.
The younger boy was squatted beneath the pelt, staring away over the desert. Though his head did not move, his eye flickered once or twice, aware of Miller, who sensed that, should he make a sudden motion, this creature would spring sideways and away, coming to rest, still watching him, after a single bound. Wild as they were, however, the two seemed less afraid of him than intent upon him. He could not rid himself of the notion that these wild, strange boys had been awaiting him in their cave near the Quitobaquito Springs.
The dark boy drew near and took the two bottles of soda from Miller’s hands. The exchange was ceremonial, without communication. The squatting boy, in turn, received his bottle from the other, clutching it with both hands and sniffing it over before bending his head and sucking the liquid upward.
Miller returned inside to get his beer, and leaned backward heavily against the counter. His headache had grown worse, and the smell of the rancid water on the bottle sickened him. He put it down, seizing the counter as a wave of vertigo shrouded his sight, and the boy in the doorway wavered in black silhouette.
From somewhere near at hand, a soft voice probed for his attention. He recovered himself, sweating unnaturally, heart pounding.
“Lobo …”
“Yes,” he heard his own voice say, “that’s a fine wolf hide …”
“… el lobo de Aguila …”
“No,” Miller murmured. “No es posible.”
“Sí, sí,” hissed the proprietor. “Sí, sí.”
“No,” Miller repeated. He made his way to a crate against the wall and sagged down upon it, clasping his damp hands in a violent effort to squeeze out thought.
“Sí, amigo. El lobo de Aguila …”
Wind shook the hut, and spurts of sand scraped at the outside wall. Miller heard the crack of stiffened skin as the wolf hide fell. He pitched to his feet in time to see it skitter across the yard toward the open desert, in time to see the squatting boy run it down in one swift bound. He crouched on it, eyeing Miller over his left shoulder, the hair on the back of his head erect in the hot wind. At Miller’s approach, he backed away a little distance, not quite cringing. Miller took the hide to the proprietor, who peered at all of them out of the shadows. The dark boy, when Miller glanced at him, smiled his wide, sudden smile.
The water in his radiator was still boiling when he removed the cap. He refilled the radiator with liquid from the beer vat inside, aware of the tremor in his hand. Paying the man, he dropped the money to the ground and had to grope for it. The two boys moved toward the car in response to some signal between them, and the man in the doorway, clutching the hide, hissed for Miller’s attention.
“Señor …”
He did not continue, and would not meet Miller’s eyes.
“Adiós,” Miller said, after a moment, and the man’s lips moved, but no whisper came.
The motor, still hot, was hard to start, and the car, once moving, handled sluggishly. Miller rolled the windows up to close out the gusts of heat, but after a moment he could not catch his breath. Gasping, he rolled them down again. The two boys watched him.
According to his reckoning they were now halfway to San Luis. In early afternoon, the temperature had risen and the glare, oddly bright beneath an intermittent sun, was painful to his eyes. He saw with difficulty. His passengers seemed not to mind the heat, absorbed as they were with his expressions, the movements of his hands.
Miller’s intuitions ran headlong through his mind, but a curious despair, a resignation, muted them. He would reach San Luis or he would not, and that was all.
THE SEDAN WAS passing south of the Cabeza Prieta Mountains, great tumbled barrens looming up out of the foothills to the northward. Somewhere up there, Miller had heard, lay the still body of a flier, who only last week had left a note in his grounded plane and wandered west in search of help. He had not been found. In this weather, in this desert, a man made a single mistake, a single, small mistake—say, a mislaid hat, a neglected landmark, an unfilled canteen … He must have expressed part of this thought aloud, for the dark boy was nodding warily. When Miller squinted at him, he smiled.
“You wouldn’t last six hours out there,” Miller told him. “Don’t matter who you are.”
The boy nodded, smiling.
Miller laughed harshly, and the second boy sat forward on the edge of his seat, eyes wide. Abruptly, Miller stopped and turned away. He felt lightheaded, a little drunk.
THE LANDSCAPE ALTERED quickly now, and mountains appeared in scattered formations to the south. Their color was burnt black rather than brown, and their outlines looked crusted. Farther on, they crowded toward the road, extending weird shapes in heaps of squat, black boulders. The dull gravel of the desert floor was invaded, then replaced, by sand, and the last stunted saguaros disappeared. With every mile, the sand increased in volume, overflowing the rock and creeping up the dead crevasses. The huge boulders sank down, one by one, beneath bare dunes, until finally the distances were white, scarred here and there with outcroppings of darkness. On the road itself, broad tongues of sand seeped out from the south side, and the sky turned to a sick, whitish pall, like the smoke of subterranean fires.
They had entered the Gran Desierto. He thought about the mountains of the moon.
Miller looked a last time at his gauges. The oil pressure was stable still, but the temperature needle, a streak of bright red in the monotone of his vision, was climbing. He knew he should slow the whining car, but he could not. Huddled together, his passengers sat rigid, eyes narrowed to slits against the sea of white. The younger one was panting audibly.
Miller tried to talk, but no sound came. The dark boy gazed at Miller, then placed his arm about his brother’s shoulder.
A tire split before the water went, and the car swerved onto the sand shoulder of the road. He wrenched at the wheel in a spasm of shock, and the sedan lurched free again like a mired animal, stalling and coming to rest as the rear tire settled. Miller fought for breath. He sat a moment blinking, as the sand, in wind-whipped sheets, whitened the pavement. Then he got out, and the two boys followed. Retreating a little distance, they observed him as he opened the trunk and yanked the jack and lug wrench and spare tire from the litter of bags and traps.
The cement was too hot to touch, and the unseen sun too high in the pale sky to afford shade. Miller spread his bedroll and kneeled on it, working feverishly but ineffectually. He felt near to fainting, and the blown sand seared his face, and he burned his hands over and over on the hot shell of the sedan. But he managed at last to free the tire, and was fighting the spare into place when a sound behind him made him whirl. The dark boy stood over him, holding the iron lug wrench.
Mil
ler leapt up, stumbling backward.
“Christ!” his voice croaked. Crouching, he came forward again, stalking the child, who dropped the wrench and moved away. Miller picked it up and followed him. The younger was squatting on the roadside, lifting one scorched foot and then the other, and emitting a queer, mournful whine. His brother took his hand and pulled him away. Unwilling to leave the shelter of the car, they kept just out of reach. When Miller stopped, they stopped also, peering uneasily at the wrench in his clenched hand. Then Miller raised the wrench and went for them, and the younger moaned and ran. The older did not move. Miller, lowering his arm, stopped short. The boy’s gaze was bared, implacable. Then he, too, turned and moved after the other, and took his hand. Miller watched until their small shimmering forms disappeared behind black boulders.
Swaying on the road, Miller licked his lips. Something had passed. Maybe the kid was only trying to help, he thought. What the hell’s the matter? Didn’t you see them children holding hands?
“You ignorant bastard,” he murmured, stunned. He repeated it, then cried aloud in pain. He ran to the car and finished the job, leaving the tools and broken tire on the road. The motor started weakly, but in his desperate efforts to turn the car around, he sank it inexorably into the sand of the road shoulder. The engine block cracked and the car died. He got out and stared. Then he started off, half-running, in the direction taken by the children.
Nearing the boulders, he stopped and shouted, “Niños, niños! I don’t mean no harm!”
But his throat was parched and his tongue dry, and the sound he made was cracked and muted. Somewhere the boys were taking shelter, but if they heard him, they were afraid and silent. Over his head, the sun glowed like a great white coal, dull with the ash of its own burning, without light.
“Niños!”
He knew that if he did not find them, they might die. Tired, he entered the maze of rocks, calling out every little while to the vast silence. The rocks climbed gradually in growing masses toward a far black butte, and as the day burned to its end, the wind died and a pallid sun shone through the haze. It sank away, and its last light crept slowly toward the summit, reddening the stones to fierce magnificence, only to fade at sunset into the towering sky.
Miller toiled up through the shadows. He reached the crest toward evening, on his knees, and his movement ceased. From somewhere below, a little later, he heard a shrill, clear call, and the call was answered, as he awoke, from a point nearer. In the dream, the children had walked toward him hand in hand.
He sat up a little, blinking, and fingered the dry furrows of his throat. To the north, the flier’s empty eyes stared up, uncomprehending. But Miller, without thinking, understood. His hand fell, and as his wait began, his still face grew entranced, impassive. The rocks turned cold. About him, in strange shapes of night, the mountains of Mexico gaped, crowded, leapt and stretched away across the moonlit wastes. The nameless range where he now lay stalked south through the Gran Desierto, sinking at last on the dead, salt shores of the Gulf of California.
1958
HORSE LATITUDES
Our ship—a British freighter that hauled Christmas trees and small machinery from New York Harbor down through the Antilles to South America and up the Amazon—had scarcely left Pier B in Red Hook when an amusing fight broke out between the occupants of one of her two cabins. Since it was I who occupied the other (at the behest of the travel associations, I was composing a brochure on freighter travel), and I liked things to myself, I had no wish to alter our arrangements, nor was I—I’ll be candid—in the least anxious that these natural enemies escape each other, since the forty-day voyage that lay ahead promised little enough in the way of entertainment.
Horace, shrill with good cheer in the Lord, was a Baptist missionary returning to his glum flock in the jungle. The morose Hassid, a Lebanese merchant who shrugged constantly, resignedly, in awareness of the whole world’s weight on his soft shoulders, was impelled by a sallow destiny toward Belém, at the river’s mouth, where customs required that he appear in person with his wares—television sets and small refrigerators, together with two gigantic outboard motors. Hassid was fluent in four languages, having traveled widely in the world—the sure mark of a fly-by-night in the eyes of Horace, who had traveled scarcely anywhere beyond Mato Grosso and east Tennessee. In response to the missionary’s brash inquiries regarding his religious affiliations, “if any,” Hassid mentioned a Protestant grandmother, a Freemason father, and a lingering acquaintance with the Church in Rome. Horace referred to this suspicious figure as “the Turk,” making it a point never to use his name, while Hassid used his tormentor’s name at every opportunity, deeming this sufficiently insulting.
The Baptist was a sprightly boyish sort with a snap-on pink bow tie. For hours at a time he hunched over his new shortwave radio, “awaiting orders from on High,” his roommate said, although all he was doing, I’d discovered, was crooning accompaniment to the latest tunes from Finland and Cambodia.
“Enjoys music,” I assured Hassid. “He’s quite harmless.”
“He is very harmful to me,” Hassid snarled.
These cabin mates’ one common bond had placed them instantly in competition, and our first meal was a sorrowful affair. Just recently the Lebanese had suffered the removal of an abscess from his nose, which he stroked continuously, his moist brown eyes appealing for commiseration. The missionary, not to be outdone, described in detail to the table—where sat at that moment, in addition to ourselves, the First Mate and the Chief Engineer, observing the new passengers in some alarm—the even more recent excision of some pesky hemorrhoids, a triumph over the Forces of Darkness for which he gave full credit to the Lord. Horace had an odd squawking voice and a sudden shrieking laugh perhaps more pleasing to the Antichrist than to his Maker. Uttered now for no apparent reason, it confounded the poor Levantine, who took his slighted nose into both of his soft hands and peered through his ringed fingers at his shipmate.
“What is it you call yourself?” the Turk hissed finally. “Horse ass?”
“Hor-ace,” said Horace. “An upright Christian name.”
“With a W?” Hassid inquired archly, directing this question to me. He winked just to bedevil Horace, knowing the missionary would not acknowledge such a joke even if he got it. From that point on, as the friend of these two enemies, I served them as both referee and foil, tossing in small provocations just to keep things lively.
“Turk,” mused Horace, chewing carefully.
“Whore-ass,” Hassid murmured here and there during the meal, shaking his head in gloomy wonderment, while the two Britons huddled over their food.
OUR SHIP SAILED OUT that evening into North Atlantic storms, and by next day Hassid’s soiled complexion had turned sickly. Propped up at the mess table, he looked embalmed. At the noon meal, Horace informed him that he looked “poorly,” at which Hassid put his whole face in his hands. “I been noticin them li’l beads of sweat on yo’ upper lip,” Horace continued, just before Hassid bolted from the table. “Smell that fish?”
Horace complained about the fish smell in the galley. He could not bear the sight or smell of fish. The Lord ate fish, I reminded him, stirring things up to rally Hassid, who was losing their struggle by default, but Horace put me nicely in my place.
“He probably liked it,” Horace said, and Hassid had the ingratitude to smile.
The Turk did his best to appear at meals, since the Chief had told him that food was the best cure for seasickness. The long days of rough seas had “knocked us back a bit,” in the Chief’s phrase. The slow pace exasperated Hassid when he was well enough to feel emotion, since he’d already missed a swifter ship owing to the operation on his nose. If he got “indisposed” even once again, he’d quit this ship of fools at the next port and fly to Belém.
“How to kill this time?” Hassid begged each day, rolling his soft eyes heavenward in supplication. “How to kill this time?” He was the only man I ever knew who tore his ha
ir—I thought this habit had gone out of fashion. In fair weather, he crouched up in the bow, staring away toward southern destinies, in hope of nothing. The Chief responded to his ceaseless plaints by saying that a man had best be patient about arriving anywhere. “What is a day, a week, even a month, after all?” he once inquired—an old, sad, touching observation that the Turk misconstrued in his great misery as an affront.
The Chief was an amiable old Scot, gone bald and a bit bleary with hard use. Though scarcely garrulous, he doubtless was considered so by the First Mate, whom we never saw except across the table. The First was a rufous, blocky man who detested anything not known in Liverpool, but happily he talked little while he dined. Having stuffed his gob with thick bread gobbets until his soup was set before him, he proceeded doggedly through the little menu, taking all choices in the order listed, plate after plate, like somebody packing a bag. The one dish he would not consume was “American mutton,” a weekly entrée which lent our menu its one hint of international cuisine. (I asked him once what distinguished “American” mutton. “Different animal altogether,” huffed the First.)
In Bermuda, our first port of call, Horace passed the day at a small white table in an ice-cream parlor, writing sappy postcards to his wife and drinking soft, sweet drinks. Hassid sat with him, head in hands, in an ennui that would persist another fortnight, all the way, in fact, to Port-au-Prince. “Got your sea legs yet?” Horace would ask him every little while, and wink at me. I suggested reading as a cure, but the Turk’s sole interests were young girls and commerce. Reading, he said, made him nervous, and as it happened, a dislike of books was the one thing he and Horace would agree upon. Despite their enmity, he had acquired a taste for Horace’s company, having doubtless perceived that his dark dream of undoing this man’s moral superiority was all that stood between him and his monstrous boredom. For his part, the missionary clung to some fond hope of redeeming the sybaritic Turk, whom he preached to nightly.
On the River Styx: And Other Stories Page 8
