Red Sky at Morning (12 page)

Over at the other bed, the relatives were alternately grieving—a little too soon, I felt; the patient wasn't dead—and discussing the division of the property. One of them, a strongly built young man who should have been out earning a living by himself, was saying: "Papacito, you know I should get all the land east of the big cottonwood, because it was me told you to plant alfalfa there in the first place. I mean, Jesus, Papacito, what the hell can Ramon do with six acres, anyway?"

Marcia picked up one of Chango's tough brown hands and patted it, something she'd never have done if he'd been on his feet. "You look terrible, Maximiliano," she said solicitously. "What does it feel like to get stabbed all the way into your liver?"

"It hurts," he answered. "It feels like I'm on fire in there."

Over at the other bed, where the agony was taking place, one of the women said, "The big room has eighteen
vigas
across the ceiling, and if you're going to divide it equally, Carmen and Consuelo and I should get six each, and since I'm the oldest I ought to get the six in the middle, with the fireplace."

Steenie stuck his fingers out straight and flat, and pointed them down, over Chango's stomach. "I'm going to probe a little, Chango. Scream out if I hit a tender spot."

Chango turned even paler, and sweat broke out on his upper lip. "Jesus, please for God's sake don't poke me down there. Christ almighty,
te ruego, hombre.
I'm not kidding, man."

"If you touch him, William Stenopolous, I'll never speak to you again," Marcia said.

Steenie emitted a professional-sounding hum, and let his fingers relax. "Perhaps actual palpation won't be necessary," he continued. "You notice what happened with the mere threat. He said 'please.' This may be a medical miracle, like sulfa or anesthesia."

"Please, please, please, man," Chango said.

"By God," Steenie said. "A complete change of personality. I wonder if
The Lancet
would accept an article from a seventeen-year-old American amateur. It would be a nice thing to show the faculty when I enter medical school."

At the other bed, one of the sons or nephews was saying, "Well, hell, old man, if you won't say where you got the silver plates hidden at least tell me where to get the keys to the pickup."

"How you doing, Chango?" I said. "Aren't you going to call me any names?"

"Man," Chango said, "I'm real sorry about that. Real sorry. You never did anything to me, and I want to get that off my conscience."

"Chango, how come you're talking so fancy? What happened to that greaseball accent?"

"I just talked like that 'cause I thought it was tough. I was, you know,
muy macho."

"You don't look so
macho
now, guy," Marcia told him. "You look like you just had twins."

The tender scene at the other bed was getting noisier. The sick man had turned around to face his family, and was giving them all the finger. "I told you I already had confession and the last rites and all that, so my soul's clean and I'm not going to talk about business. The lawyer's got the will, and after I'm gone you can all have a look at it. If you don't like what you find, you can fly up to heaven and kiss my ass."

Chango gestured at the bereaved family. "They been going on like that all day. That's a tough old man over there, but they'll kill him sooner or later."

"And you, you
perezozo pendejo,"
the old man was saying to the largest and huskiest of the men, "if I leave you any property you'll have to get off the welfare and either work the land or find a job. Do you think at forty years old you'd be willing to make such a big change in your life? Hah? Get out of here, all of you, before I blaspheme and have to do the whole extreme unction all over again."

The oldest woman of the family said. "Let's all pray for the soul of your father," and the children obediently arranged themselves in pious attitudes and began keening in Latin.

"The Good Lord won't listen to a word you say," the old man told them. "He doesn't hear it when a weasel prays to Him to let him get into the hen house." He flipped around and faced the wall again.

Marcia was looking at Chango as if he were a wrapped Christmas present. "Can I pull down the sheet and see where the knife went in?" she asked him. "I've never seen a real stab wound."

"It's all covered over with bandages," Chango said. "They got a rubber tube stuck in there, and they feed me through the . . . they don't let me eat the usual way."

"I know a joke about that," Steenie said. "This guy was being fed rectally, and he asked the doctor. . . ."

"I know it too, man. Don't tell it in front of the girl," Chango pleaded.

"I swear," Steenie said, "if I'd known a knife could do this I'd have used one on you years ago. You going to take holy orders as soon as you get out of high school?"

"Chango," I said, "what was all that crap you told Chamaco? You know I don't know anything about Tarzan, except that he scared the hell out of me that day by the
acequia."

"Man, I thought Tarzan would come to see you after he stuck me. He's crazy. He wants to stick a knife in everybody. That day on Camino Chiquito I didn't even know he
had
a knife. I just asked him to help me some. We were gonna knock you around and kick you a little bit so you wouldn't wise off. Man, I really didn't know. And then you took off like a coyote and ran into that guy's patio. Hell, I knew where you were. I could see your shadow there by the woodpile, but I was afraid if I told Tarzan he'd go in there and cut you. And then last night I saw him down by the river, and he'd been thinking about it all that time and he was in a real bad mood. He said I was chicken. He said I practiced running fast so I could catch rabbits and make
pinche
with them. So then I told him to go to hell and he said,
'Tómalo, cabrón,'
and stuck me with his
hojita,
and man, I went down. Then while I'm lying there he bends over and says, 'I'm gonna finish the job on
Josué'
and then he kicked me in the . . . and then he kicked me and took off. So, man, I thought if he hadn't got you already you might at least know where he is, so I told Chamaco. Does Chamaco know where he is?"

"Chamaco told me he could be biding out north of town, or he might have hitchhiked somewhere."

"No, he isn't gonna leave town unless the cops really get after him."

"Well, who's this
Josué
he's after? Me?"

"That's you, man. I mean, he knows where you live and which way you walk to school. You better look out.

He's not young like us. He's twenty years old. He spent three years in the sixth grade."

A nurse came in briskly and said, "Here's your dinner, young man. Your visitors will have to leave." An orderly was wheeling in a stainless steel hatrack with some bottles and tubes hanging on it.

"Mmm," Steenie said. "Looks delicious."

"Don't kid around about that, man," Chango said. "It ain't funny."'

The family at the other bed finished their prayers and put their beads away. The old man was still facing the wall.

It snowed for three days in early November, and the people of Sagrado put their cars in garages and walked everywhere. Amadeo, who came in from Río Conejo every morning in the pickup, put snow chains on the rear tires and loaded the truck bed with three hundred pounds of concrete blocks to get traction. An entire family of Navajo Indians froze to death in a drafty hogan near Beclabito, when the temperature went to 46 below one night. Forest Rangers on snowshoes hiked up to Bernal Peak and announced that the 117 inches of snowpack promised a good spring runoff.
The Conquistador
ran a picture page called "Winter Wonderland," which showed primarily that one of their photographers didn't know how to compensate for the glare on snow and had overexposed a lot of film. Amadeo and I stacked three cords of foot-and-a-half split piñon for the fireplaces, and the whole town smelled like a campfire. Parker gave me a venison hindquarter and my mother told me to take the filthy thing out of the house, so I gave it to Excilda. She and Amadeo and I stuffed ourselves on venison chile for a week, and then she made
sopa de albondigas
with what was left. I went sledding with Marcia and Steenie, on Otero Hill, the three of us piled up sandwich fashion on one sled, Marcia on top. We just missed getting creamed by the Blue Goose Laundry truck. Nobody knew what had happened to Tarzan Velarde; we all hoped that he was now lying, stiff as a plank, under a juniper tree in a nameless arroyo. Bucky Swenson set a new conference record for rebound baskets and gave a modest interview to
The Conquistador's
sports editor, in which he said that regular church attendance played an important part in his training.

The highways were closed for almost a week. When a Highway Department employee named Orlando Lucero drove the first snowplow into town, opening the roads again, the mayor declared it Orlando Lucero Day, and the Chamber of Commerce gave a dinner for him. Lucero got drunk at the dinner and smashed the window of Wormser's Dry Goods while driving his snowplow recklessly around the Plaza. The snow drove a herd of elk into town. One of the bulls wandered into the Sagrado State Bank and got an antler caught in a teller's window. They called Chamaco, after the Game Department tried ineffectively to lure the elk outside with a bale of alfalfa. Chamaco shot it with his service revolver. The animal weighed 900 pounds and the depositors had to stand on top of it that morning to get their banking done, because it was too heavy to drag out. After Orlando Lucero got out of jail, where he served three days for drunkenness after the incident with Wormser's Dry Goods, he went back to his job with the Highway Department and ruptured the town's main gas line with his backhoe the same afternoon. The mayor and the City Council met and, for the first time in three hundred and fifty years, withdrew a proclamation — the one establishing Orlando Lucero Day — and issued another one banishing Lucero from "the hospitality and usufruct of La Villa Real del Corazón Sagrado."

Jimbob Buel went outside in his slippers to berate Amadeo, who was shoveling snow, noisily, beneath Jimbob's window one morning, and caught a head cold, which turned into a chest cold, and then into lobar pneumonia. He went into the hospital the same day that Chango was released.

I'd been visiting Chango fairly regularly after school, and sometimes I walked there with his sister Viola. She was moody and withdrawn, a little too wrapped up in Holy Mother Church for my taste. Out of respect for her beliefs, and equal respect for Chango's former bad humor, I tried to keep my eyes off the front of her blouse. When she took the veil, the ecclesiastical tailors were going to have trouble fitting her into a habit. Viola and I were on hand, along with Steenie and Marcia and Chango's parents, the day he got out.

He was still slightly pallid, and his Levis hung loosely around his hips, but he looked ready to go. The knife had truly frightened him, he said, and knowing what it felt like to be on the receiving end he claimed he was through with being a professional
macho,
unless someone really insulted him. He still had the arms and shoulders of a medium-sized gorilla, and I didn't think it likely that anyone smaller than Primo Carnera would think of trifling with him. He chivalrously took off his shirt to let Marcia see the scar, which she'd begged him to do every time she came to see him. Viola turned her head delicately while this coarse disrobing took place. Chango's scar ran from his navel to the right side of his ribcage; the first inch was thick and crooked, where Tarzan's knife had penetrated. The rest of it was thin and surgical. The surgeon had opened him up like a gored bullfighter to clean the wound.

"Eeho-lay," Marcia said. "That's a beauty!"

"You feeling all right?" Chango's mother asked him in Spanish. "You feeling pretty strong?"

"Sure, Mama," Chango said.

She cracked him a stiff one on the cheek with her open hand. "Maybe now you'll stay away from
pachucos
like Tarzan Velarde, may the root of his tree be torn out and burned on the Fourth of July."

"Aw, Mama," Chango said, rubbing his cheek.

"It's cold as ice cream outside," Mrs. Lopez said. "I brought you a sweater,
carito mio,
you with your big ideas."

"They didn't find Tarzan yet, did they?" Chango asked.

"No," Steenie answered. "They'll dig him out next spring sometime, if the coyotes don't get to him first."

"Ojalá que tengas razón,"
Mrs. Lopez said. "I hope you're right."

Mr. Lopez had brought his pickup—you just weren't anybody around Sagrado unless you owned a pickup—and we drove slowly, with lots of skids, to Chango's house. I'd never been there before; I'd always assumed he lived in a cage. It was an old adobe on the west side of town, with an acre of kitchen garden, now snow-covered. I don't know how Mr. Lopez made the worthless soil in Sagrado produce, but he said he got three grades of chile, cucumbers, squash, tomatoes, corn,
frijoles
and asparagus out of it. Mrs. Lopez gave us coffee and we sat around and kidded Chango about what a brave little trouper he was. Mrs. Lopez slapped him again, and then gave him a big hug. Pale as he was, we could see the blushes clearly. Marcia insisted on seeing his bedroom. He showed us a bare, monastic cell with an old photograph of Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll on the wall.

Mr. Lopez offered to drive us home, but we declined. It was a fine, cold evening, and we felt like walking. Marcia said on our way home that she'd always known Chango couldn't be as bad as everyone thought he was. Steenie said the conversion was less medical than he'd first suspected, and more mystical. "That dirty bandit has had a first-class religious experience," he announced, "and it was Tarzan's knife that did it to him. I'm going to write directly to the Pope and suggest that he equip all of his missionaries with six-inch shivs. 'Do you believe in Holy Mother Church, infidel? No? Then,
tómalo!'"
Steenie stabbed an imaginary unbeliever in the navel with an imaginary knife, and converted an imaginary heathen. "I may go into church work," he said. "Convert 'em first, and sew 'em up afterwards. I'll be a medical missionary with a built-in practice."