Against the Day (181 page)

One day they both disappeared, and
come to find out damn if they hadn’t taken off together on the Juárez train
amid public displays of affection. And who had chosen to linger here instead
but Wren Provenance, who, like a mother with a small baby, got to see Frank
stand on his feet and take his first steps, who went with him for walks that
took them farther and farther from the wrecked church, till one day what was
clear to everybody else came to pass and they found themselves down some little
arroyo under the willows and cottonwoods enthusiastically fucking, while a
variety of wildlife looked

on with interest. “Like this,” slipping out of her trousers
and straddling him, “Don’t look so shocked, it’s me, remember?” hands in each
other’s hair, hands everywhere, come to that, kisses, and when had they kissed
so hungrily before? bites, nails, heedless words maybe, neither could remember.

   
“Well
how’d that happen?”

She
gave him a look. Her impulse was to say, “Don’t ask me, it never happens to me,
fact I tend to forget about it for long stretches . . .” which of course is how
the monologue would go hours later, alone with her thoughts. But at the moment
she refrained from sharing any of this with Frank.

“Well,”
a minute or two away from broodful, “long as it don’t get filed under good
works or somethin like that.”

“Frank.”
She had been lying with her face against his chest but now pushed upright
again, as if to have a good look at him. And she could not, would not keep from
smiling. “I’m beginning to think that that Ewball was right about you. Haven’t
been taking your daily stupidity pills, have you.”

“All right.” Pulled her back down
where she’d been. “All right.”

The harsh hum
filled the valley. Everybody looked
up. The biplane slowly became visible, as if emerging from the resolute
blankness of history. “Now what in ’e hell’s that?” Frank wondered. Though this
was the first time it had come up this way, the Tarahumares appeared to know what
it was. It might be bringing anything, to a degree of unpleasantness unknown so
far in modern warfare, which was already unpleasant enough. Townsfolk would
reckon events for years to come as occurring before or after the airplane came.

El Espinero brought
Frank
a cane shaped from
a nice piece of oak from farther up in the Sierra, “A gringo might call it a
‘walking stick,’ but the Tarahumare use these as
runningsticks,
when our
legs get sore and we can’t run any faster than a galloping horse.” As usual
Frank couldn’t tell how serious he ought to take that. But there must’ve been
some sorcery in the stick, all right, because the more Frank used it, the less
he had to use it.

   
“What
does that mean?” said Wren.

“Native magic makes you nervous, huh?
Some anthropologist you turn out to be.”

   
When
she was sure he was able to sit a horse again, she took hold of him by

his shirt front and said, “Look, I’m going to have to go back
to work.”

   
“Back
at Casas Grandes.”

   
“Think
I’ve spotted one or two of the old crew back in the vicinity.”

   
“Mind
if I ride along?”

   
“Didn’t
know you were interested.”

   
The
site still bore the signs of abrupt departure, though as Wren had suggested,
one or two Harvard halfwits were to be observed nosing around the perimeter.
Seeing the spectacle of mud dilapidation, sliding toward abandonment since long
before the first Spaniards showed up, Frank understood immediately that this
was where the
hikuli
had taken him the other night, what El Espinera had
wanted him to see—what, in his morose and casehardened immunity to
anything extraliteral, he had to begin to see, and remember he saw, if he was
to have even an outside chance of saving his soul.

They approached a huge remnant,
clearly put together as rightangled as anybody could ask for. “This was the
main building,” she said.

“Well.
Casas grandes,
for
sure. I’d say about four and a half acres here, just by eye.”

“And at least three stories high when
it was new. Some of the others ran five or six.”

   
“And
these were the same folks—”

“You can see how thick the walls are.
They were not about to be caught twice.”

“But if it was them ended up in the
Valley of Mexico, then this was a stopover and didn’t last either.”

“Nobody knows. And at the moment I’m
also very curious about these Mormon settlements suddenly appearing all over
this part of the Sierra Madre.”

   
“Just
like back at the McElmo,” Frank said.

“A professorial person,” she
supposed, “would ask at least why the Mormon Odyssey and the Aztec flight
should have so many points in common.” She did not appear pleased at the
thought.

“Maybe I’ll talk to El Espinero. What
about those pictures—have you found any of them here?”

She knew which pictures. “Pottery,
stone tools, corn grinders, no sign of the creatures they drew on the rock
walls up north—so absent in fact that it’s suspicious. As if it’s
deliberate. As if they’re almost desperate to deny what’s pursuing them by not
making any images of it at all. So it ends up being everywhere, but invisible.”

He understood for a moment, as if in
the breeze from an undefined wing passing his face, that the history of all
this terrible continent, clear to the Pacific Ocean and the Arctic ice, was
this same history of exile and migration,

the white man moving in on the Indian, the eastern
corporations moving in on the white man, and their incursions with drills and
dynamite into the deep seams of the sacred mountains, the sacred land.

Wren had a little
house
at the edge of
town with a vegetable patch and scarlet madreselva climbing up the walls and a
nice view off the ridge, with the Casas Cirandes ruins an easy mile or so down
the road. Frank spent the days out and about doing odd jobs, some carpentering
and plastering, repair work from the fighting mostly, and the nights in bed
with Wren, as honorably as he knew how to inhabit the joys of domestic fucking.
Sometimes he searched her sleeping face, so obliged to sorrows older than
itself, wishing he knew what it would take for him to set up a perimeter she
might at least dream quietly inside of, because she sure was making a lot of
noise at night. All he’d ever known how to do really, like Webb and Mayva
before him, was move from one disappointment to another, dealing with each as
best he could. Wren was on her own trail, and he was afraid that at some point
she would scout too far forward, through a canyon or across a stream invisible
to everybody else, and pass into the cruel country of the invaders, the people
with wings, the serpents who spoke, the poisonous lizards who never lost a
fight. Where she would come to no supernallylighted city but instead into a
merciless occupation, lives of slavery only barely, contemptuously disguised,
which eventually would gather in her own as well. He knew that in her unspoken
story of long pilgrimage and struggle he only happened to be on the same piece
of trail for the moment. Understanding that she wished to protect him against
whatever lay at its grim destination, he felt a queer twinge of gratitude.

These apprehensions, fugitive and as
hard to recover as dreams, were confirmed by El Espinero, with whom Frank would
visit now and then up at Temósachic, where the
brujo
took him out to
gather herbs whose names he forgot as soon as he heard them, as if they were
protecting themselves against future gringo mischief, and when the season
turned, the husband of Estrella taught him to stalk antelope Tarahumare
fashion, while rigged out in an antelope skin, and whenever they came in
eyeball range of each other, Estrella looked through, past and around him as if
he were invisible, which after a while he understood he was.

“Except,” advised El Espinero, “not
to the young lady Wren. She will see you no matter what.”

   
“Even
if we—”

   
“You
will not be together for long. You know that already. But she will always see
you. I have read the thorns, that is what they say.” They watched a couple of
giant woodpeckers systematically eating a tree.

“The professors she works for return
in September to the other side,” Frank said, “and soon after that the work is
finished for the year. I can’t see ahead anymore. I should be warning her about
something, keeping her safe from it, but—”

   
El
Espinero smiled. “She is your child?”

   
“How
can I just—”

“I looked also at the thorns of your
life, Panchito. You walk very different paths. Yours is not as strange as hers,
maybe.” Frank knew that whenever the
brujo
spoke to a white person of
“paths,” he was thinking not too kindly of the railway, which like most of his
people he hated for its destruction of the land, and what had once grown and
lived there. Frank respected this—who at some point hadn’t come to hate
the railroad? It penetrated, it broke apart cities and wild herds and
watersheds, it created economic panics and armies of jobless men and women, and
generations of hard, bleak citydwellers with no principles who ruled with
unchecked power, it took away everything indiscriminately, to be sold, to be
slaughtered, to be led beyond the reach of love.

Wren
got on the Juárez train one day in late October. Frank had thought of riding
with her at least as far as San Pedro Junction anyway, but when the moment came
he found he couldn’t.

“I’ll
say hello to the girls on Market Street,” she said, and though their kiss went
on for what could have been hours, so little did it have to do with clock time,
she was already miles away down those rails before their lips even touched.

eef, Yashmeen, and Cyprian, having passed a few profitable
weeks at Biarritz and Pau before the seasonal lull as English tourists gave way
to those from the Continent, returning now eastward to the casinos of the
Riviera, wandered across the Anarchist spa of YzlesBains, hidden near the
foothills of the Pyrenees, among steep hillsides covered with lateripening
vines, whose shoots were kept away from the early frosts by supports that
looked like garlanded crucifixes. White columns and shadowed archways emerged
from the mists of a cheerfully noisy
gave
a short distance up the
valley, beyond which lay the trailhead of a secret and secure route into and
out of Spain. Veterans of the Cataluñan struggle, former residents of
Montjuich, hasheesh devotees enroute to Tangier, refugees from as far away as
the U.S. and Russia, all could find lodging at this venerable oasis without
charge, though in practice even those against the commoditizing of human
shelter were often able to come up with modest sums in a dozen currencies, and
leave them with Lucien the concierge.

In town, in an elliptical plaza,
opening out unexpectedly, into afternoon sun and long shadows, dozens of small
groups had set up camp, like bathers at the seaside, with coffee messes,
cooking fires, bedrolls, flowers in flowerpots, awnings and tents. It might
have reminded Reef of a mining camp early in the history of a silver strike,
except that these solemn young folks carried with them an austerity, a
penultimacy before some unstated future, a Single Idea, whose power everything
else ran off of. Here it was not silver or gold but something else. Reef could
not quite see what it was.

   
Grouped
near one of the foci of the ellipse, a choir was practicing a sort of