“That burro sure hates you, Harley.”
Harley laughed. “Nobody ever rode it before, except maybe some of the kids when my dad had it over at Casa Blanca.”
“Does it buck?”
“It tries, but I think I’m too heavy for it. It doesn’t jump very high.” Harley was big and stocky. “My legs almost touch the ground anyway.”
Tayo smiled again. His mouth felt stiff at the corners. Harley had been at Wake Island with Leroy Valdez and Emo. They had all come back with Purple Hearts, but it didn’t seem as if the war had changed Harley; he was still a little fat, and he still made them laugh, joking and clowning.
“Hey! You don’t happen to have a beer, do you?”
Tayo shook his head. “There’s some coffee on the stove.”
“No, they say coffee is bad for you.” He laughed, and Tayo smiled because Harley didn’t use to like beer at all, and maybe this was something that was different about him now, after the war. He drank a lot of beer now. But Tayo could remember that time in the eighth grade when they had followed old Benny to see where he kept his wine. They watched him weave unsteadily through the salt bush down to the river willows and tamarics, growing along the river, all the while clutching his brown shopping bag close to his chest. They watched him take one last taste of the wine and push the cork in tight before he put it back in the bag, then carefully dig into the sandy riverbank, pushing white sand around the bag tenderly. They crouched with their chins on the sand and fallen willow leaves, peeking through the willows at him as he took a last look, as if to memorize the hiding place, and then walked crookedly up the hill, away from the river. They got to their feet then, and when Benny disappeared over the hill, they ran to the hiding place, where the river flowed into a quiet pool. Rocky and Tayo took the bottle of wine because there was only one bottle of beer.
“Okay for you, Harley,” Rocky said, “beer tastes awful.”
“Aw, you don’t know. You never tasted any,” Harley answered, trying to pry off the bottle cap with the short blade of his pocket knife.
“He’s right, Harley. Josiah let us taste some one time.”
The wine was sweet and sticky, a little like cough syrup, but they drank it anyway because they had to if they wanted to get drunk. Harley finally got the beer open, and he was anxious to catch up with them so he took a big swallow. He made a terrible face, wrinkling up his nose and rolling his eyes. He spent the rest of the afternoon spitting into the river, and they had to keep laughing because he kept saying, “Ugh! Awful! It tastes like poison!” And then he would spit again and try to wipe the inside of his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt.
Harley squatted down beside Tayo. He traced little figures in the dirt by his feet. Tayo closed his eyes and leaned back against the bottom of the tree; he flexed his feet out in front of him. They were quiet for a while. The wind was getting stronger; it made a whirling sound as it came around the southwest corner of the ranch house. A piece of old tin on the roof of the shed began to rattle. Tayo felt as if he could sleep, and maybe make up for the bad night before. There was a peaceful silence beneath the sounds of the wind; it was a silence with no trace of people. It was the silence of hard dry clay and old juniper wood bleached white.
But Harley was restless; Tayo could feel it. Harley kept wiping away the outlines he drew in the dirt and starting over again, angry that he couldn’t draw them the way he wanted them. Tayo brought his knees up in front of him and concentrated on staying awake. Harley grinned at him.
“We got it easy, huh? All the livestock down at Montaño and nothing for us war heroes to do but lay around and sleep all day.” He reached over and poked Tayo gently in the ribs when he said “war heroes.”
“I tried to go down there and help out, you know, when they first decided to move all the cattle and sheep down there. That was when you were still sick.” Harley shook his head. “Really, man, I tried to help. I told my old man, ‘Hey, let me do it. I promise I won’t mess up. Honest.’” Harley was drawing an intricate pattern in the dirt, moving his forefinger without pausing then.
“But you know what happened, so they don’t want me down there any more. They told me I could look after the ranch out here. Like you.” Harley looked up quickly to see Tayo’s face.
“You know what I mean, Tayo,” he said quickly, “you were really sick when you got back, and there isn’t a damn thing wrong with me.”
Tayo nodded, but he was thinking about what happened while Harley was at the Montaño herding sheep, and he wasn’t sure if Harley was right.
The Montaño had not been as hard hit by the drought, so people with cattle and sheep moved them from areas of the reservation which had no grass or water to the Montaño, where they would keep them until the rains came, or for as long as the grass held out. Harley had gone to herd sheep for his family. They pitched a small square camp tent for him and brought him supplies and fresh things to eat every two or three days. He had a sheep dog to help him and a horse to ride all day long behind the grazing animals. His family was happy that he wanted to do this, because it had taken Harley a while to settle down after he got home from the war. He had done a lot of drinking and raising hell with Emo and some of the other veterans.
But after a week down there, Harley left the sheep grazing, with only the sheep dog to watch them, and he rode the horse over to the highway. When they found the horse, it was still standing there, tied to the fence, only somebody had come along and stolen the saddle off it. Harley was gone, and a couple of days later he wrote from the jail in Los Lunas. By the time they got down to the Montaño, the sheep were scattered all over the hills. At the camp they found the sheep dog dead, killed and torn to pieces by the wild animals that had killed thirty head of sheep.
“It was too bad about the dog and those sheep,” Tayo said.
But Harley laughed; he shook his head and laughed very loudly. “They weren’t worth anything anyway. So skinny and tough the coyotes had to kill half of them just to make one meal.” He laughed again.
Tayo felt something stir along his spine; there was something in Harley’s laugh he had never heard before. Somehow Harley didn’t seem to feel anything at all, and he masked it with smart talk and laughter. Harley stood up then, but Tayo couldn’t tell if it was because he didn’t want to talk about the sheep or if he was only getting stiff from squatting so long.
“I’d give just about anything for a cold beer,” he said, looking around the place, at the house, the shed, and the corrals.
“They didn’t leave you the truck, did they? I don’t even see Josiah’s wagon.”
“It’s under the shed by the corral. But there’s nothing to pull it anyway.”
“What about that gray mule?”
“It’s blind.”
“Boy, they sure fixed you up good. I guess they don’t want you wandering around either.”
Tayo knew he was referring to that time at the Dixie Tavern when he had almost killed Emo. They were even now. Tayo had asked about the sheep that were killed while Harley was gone, and Harley brought up the fight.
“I wanted to be alone. This is a good place for it.”
“Yeah, well not me. My old lady got out her Phillips 66 road map, and she looked at it all night until she found the place on the reservation that was the farthest away from any bars. I might be there right now, living on top of some mesa, if my father hadn’t talked her into sending me to the ranch.” Harley looked toward the southwest, in the direction of the ranch. “Shit, I think it is the farthest place anyway.”
Tayo shrugged his shoulders. They were twenty-five or thirty miles from the bars on the other side of the reservation boundary line. People called it “going up the line,” and the bars were built one after the other alongside 66, beginning at Budville and extending six or seven miles past San Fidel to the Whiting Brothers’ station near McCartys.
“They can’t stop me, so I don’t know why they even try. Like the time they left me out there and they forgot to dr
ain the gas out of the tractor. I hot-wired it and drove it all the way to San Fidel. I could have gotten back too, but I ran out of gas near Paraje.” Harley laughed. His eyes were shining. It had been a victory for him; he had outsmarted all of them—his parents, his older brothers, everyone who worked to keep him away from beer and out of trouble.
“But this is the first time I’ve ridden a burro up the line, Tayo, and”—he paused to rub his ass—“I think it will be the last time.” He walked over and kicked the sole of Tayo’s boot. “Come on. Get up. Don’t die here under this tree. Let’s go, man.”
Tayo shook his head and threw his arms up in front of him, pretending to push the idea away.
“Hey, come on. We can set some kind of world’s record—you know, longest donkey ride ever made for a cold beer or something like that. An Indian world’s record.” When Harley talked like that, things that had happened, the dead sheep, the bar fight, even jail—all seemed very remote. Harley held out his hand, and Tayo grabbed hold of it; he pulled himself to his feet.
Tayo went inside to get his wallet. When he came out, he saw Harley by the windmill; the wind had blown the brim of his hat against his forehead, but he had the gray mule and he was pulling the bridle over the long gray ears.
The mule was getting bony; its hip bones looked sharp enough to push through the gray hide, the way bones tear through a carcass. Drought years shrank the hide tighter to the bones; ewes dropped weak lambs and cows had no calves in the spring. If it didn’t start raining soon, all the livestock would have to be sold, like in the thirties, when buyers came from Albuquerque and Gallup and bought the cattle and sheep for almost nothing. But selling was better than watching them die when the grass was gone and there was no more cactus to burn for them. Emo liked to point to the restless dusty wind and the cloudless skies, to the bony horses chewing on fence posts beside the highway; Emo liked to say, “Look what is here for us. Look. Here’s the Indians’ mother earth! Old dried-up thing!” Tayo’s anger made his hands shake. Emo was wrong. All wrong.
The wind whipped the mule’s thin tail between its hind legs as Harley gave the reins to Tayo. “Don’t you have a saddle?” Harley asked. Tayo shook his head. “How about an old saddle blanket? That mule’s backbone will strike you in a vital place.” They laughed, and Harley disappeared inside the old garage, and Tayo could hear noise of empty tubs, oil cans, and links of chain moved around; Harley came out shaking the dust from four gunny sacks, letting the wind pull at them like kites. He was grinning. Tayo stood watching all this time, and except for smiling or laughing or speaking when Harley spoke to him, he wasn’t doing anything. He was standing with the wind at his back, like that mule, and he felt he could stand there indefinitely, maybe forever, like a fence post or a tree. It took a great deal of energy to be a human being, and the more the wind blew and the sun moved southwest, the less energy Tayo had. Harley was patient; he stood by the mule’s head while Tayo jumped belly first onto the mule’s back and swung a leg over; Harley held the gunny sacks in place until Tayo was on. Tayo felt like a little kid; he felt eight again, and Josiah was boosting him onto the back of Siow’s pinto.
Harley tied a lead rope on the mule’s bridle, but the gray mule followed the burro without any trouble, holding its head alert, and its jackrabbit ears forward, nostrils flaring wide, testing for imagined dangers ahead. Tayo didn’t even bother to hold the reins; he knotted them the way Josiah had shown him when he was a little kid, so that the reins stayed together on the horse’s neck. That way the horse couldn’t jerk them from his hands, and he couldn’t accidentally drop one. When you were so little that you couldn’t reach the stirrups without climbing up on a fence or big rock, these details were important.
The wind was blowing from the southwest, and it pushed against Tayo’s right shoulder. The noise of the wind was too loud for conversation, so Tayo closed his eyes. He relaxed his thighs and let his feet dangle; he slouched forward over the mule’s bony shoulders. He was tired of fighting off the dreams and the voices; he was tired of guarding himself against places and things which evoked the memories. He let himself go with the motion of the mule, swaying forward and backward with each stride, feeling the rise and fall of the mule’s breathing under his legs. Above the wind, sometimes he could hear Harley cussing out the burro, telling it what he would do if he had a gun.
The gusting winds had turned the sky dusty red. After two or three hours Harley pulled his hat low over his eyes to keep it on; and he dozed off, with both arms out in front of him, holding the donkey’s neck, propping him up. The burro must have been able to feel the change in Harley’s grip on its neck when Harley dozed off because it would begin to drift, gradually, from the right side of the road to the middle hump of sand and weeds, where it lowered its head quickly to reach a mouthful of weeds but always kept moving, trying to keep Harley from noticing any change. It got to the left side of the road that way and walked along steadily, only long enough to fool Harley, then the burro left the road entirely and completed the wide turn it had been engineering for almost half an hour. Tayo watched the burro’s deliberate moves, but its stubbornness made it predictable, and every fifteen minutes Harley jerked the burro’s head sharply to the right, flicked its flanks with the horsehair quirt, and put them back on course again. So they traveled in wide arcs, moving gradually to the north. Tayo thought about animals then, horses and mules, and the way they drifted with the wind. Josiah said that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves. Animals did not resist. But they persisted, because they became part of the wind. “Inside, Tayo, inside the belly of the wind.” So they moved with the snow, became part of the snowstorm which drifted up against the trees and fences. And when they died, frozen solid against a fence, with the snow drifted around their heads? “Ah, Tayo,” Josiah said, “the wind convinced them they were the ice.” He wished Josiah were there, not forever like he had been wishing, but just long enough so Tayo could tell him how he’d been feeling lately, how he’d almost been convinced he was brittle red clay, slipping away with the wind, a little more each day.
The wind didn’t blow as hard up there as it did on the clay flats. Harley stopped at the top of the hill and took a piss. The burro chewed the dry tufts of grass as close to the gray shale as it could and strained against the reins to reach another sparse clump of grass. But the mule stood alert, its milky staring eyes wide open. They were the same—the mule and old Grandma, she sitting in the corner of the room in the wintertime by the potbelly stove, or the summertime on an apple crate under the elm tree; she was as blind as the gray mule and just as persistent. She never hesitated to tell them that Rocky had promised to buy her a kerosene stove with his Army pay, even after Tayo came home from the hospital and she knew the sound of Rocky’s name made him cry.
“Don’t cry, Tayo, don’t cry. You know he wanted me to have it. And he didn’t want you to cry.” So finally Auntie took forty dollars of the insurance money and sent Robert to town, and he brought home an old heater with an automatic thermostat, so that once it was lighted, all it needed was a barrel of fuel oil on the wooden rack outside. She ordered that kind because she didn’t want to impose on any of them to look after her stove for her. Last year, on the coldest day of the winter, when San José creek froze solid and Auntie had gone to the store and old Grandma was all alone, the fire in the wood stove went out. This story always made Auntie stop whatever she was doing then, to say, “Mama, the coals were still warm when we got home,” and old Grandma always pretended she didn’t hear this, and she continued on about the things Rocky was going to do for her. They all mourned Rocky that way, by slipping, lapsing into the plans he had for college and for his football career. It didn’t take Tayo long to see the accident of time and space: Rocky was the one who was alive, buying Grandma her heater with the round dial on the front; Rocky was there in the college game scores on the sports page of the Albuquerque Journal. It was him, Tayo, who had died, but someho
w there had been a mistake with the corpses, and somehow his was still unburied.
He started to cry, and when Harley looked back at him he did not wipe the tears away or pretend it was the dust and wind in his eyes. He was suddenly hollow; his fingers loosened and fell from the reins, slippery with sweat. The force of gravity seemed to surge up at him and pull him down. He hung with both arms to the mule’s neck, but he was caught and being dragged away. Rolling end over end in a flash flood in a big arroyo. After his hands slipped loose, his knees hit muddy ruts and there was screaming and the sound of bone crushing, hollow white skull bone beaten to bayonet edges by the jungle rain. The flood water was the color of the earth, of their skin, of the blood, his blood dried brown in the bandages.
Harley helped him up; he brushed the sand and weeds from Tayo’s shirt and handed him his hat. He walked with him to the shade at the foot of the mesa. He hobbled the mule and tied a long rope to the burro and let them graze on the thin, bluish green leaves of salt bushes growing at the entrance to the canyon. The sand felt cool. He squeezed it in both fists until it made little rivulets between his fingers. Harley sat down beside him and wiped his face on the sleeve of his shirt.
“Sunstroke. They always warned me about it, Tayo. We should’ve stopped to rest sooner.” He looked at Tayo closely. “Are you okay?”
Tayo nodded. He wanted to make a joke about himself, say something like “Sunstroke hell, the wind blew me off,” but he didn’t have energy to move his lips, to even form the words. Beyond the shade everything shimmered in waves of heat and the wind. The cliffs across the little wash, the junipers growing among the big orange boulders, and the hazy pink sky were bright colors of a dream, and the longer Tayo stared at them, the more he knew he was going to be sick. So he scratched a hole in the dry sand beside him, and when the glare of that light finally blinded him, he turned to his right side and vomited into the hole.