Red Sky at Morning (21 page)

"I b'lieve we have message," Steenie said.

"I'll retrieve message," I promised. A vast silent earthquake had tilted Eleanor's house thirty degrees, making it necessary for me to brace myself against a corridor wall on the way to the bedroom. The same sheet of paper was pushed under the door, folded once. As I bent to pick it up the earthquake tilted the house another ten degrees, causing me to lose my balance and fall. I got up and banged the side of my fist on their door. "Earthcake!"

"What?" It was Marcia. Poor, sweet Marcia. She was going to be trapped in the room, falling timbers, flames. We had to save her. Had to save Eleanor, too. "Gout. Housafallen!"

"Go jump in a kite," she said. Didn't care what happened. Wanted to stay in the room, die with her friend. Die with Eleanor. That's what friends are for. I went back into the living room and showed the note to Steenie. "Whaz say?" he asked.

"Very impornt letter." I opened it and tried to read it, but the letters kept sliding diagonally toward the edge of the paper. Earthquake was doing that. "Don't know. Written with mov'ble ink."

" 'Mposs'ble. No such thing. Here, have more Jilbey's. Sharpen up th' vision. Lem' see." I gave the letter to him, leaned too far forward, and fell into the fireplace, where piñon was crackling.

"Gout fireplace," Steenie said. "Geh burn. Thirda gree. Haf do skin graf. Paaaiiiinful."

"Read letter."

"Saysen I quote: 'Gode hell. Sign Marcia Neleanor.'"

"Earthcake's gun gettm. Don' care. Have nother Jilbey."

We left Eleanor's house some time later, and walked carefully across the street to Steenie's. All the houses on the street were still standing. "Jus' little tremor," I said. "On'y earth coo-ake unner El'nor's house." Steenie paused by a tree and threw up on it. "Good for tree," he said. "Organic matter. Good fer'lizer. Sick. Egg rollzen spaghetti."

In Steenie's room, I sat on the floor on the bedroll and undressed. Steenie sat on the edge of his bed and looked at his right foot. "Foun' out somethin'," he muttered. "Jilbey's makes feet swell up."

"How y'know?"

"Couldn't get m'galosh on m' foot, hardly. Hadda walk over with on'y one galosh on. Geh pneumonia. Now can' get it oft."

"I'll help pull," I said. His galosh was stuck very tightly, and for five minutes he pushed at it while I pulled. When it came off, we saw that there was another galosh under it.

"Y'put two galoshes on one foot," I said. "Thass why stuck."

Steenie's face screwed up, and he broke into tears. "Thass beautiful explanation," he said. "The mos' perfect explanation I ever heard. It makes everything so clear. I mean . . . I mean . . . answers lota questions. Plan y'whole life on a thing like that." He wiped his eyes on his sleeve, and undressed. "G'night, Josh. Gah bless you."

"Gah bless you, too, Steenie. Where's light?"

"Onna wall." I crawled carefully to the wall, stood up and turned out the light. The earthquake had slowed down, but the bedroll continued to toss until I slept.

Excilda invited me to have Christmas dinner with her family in Conejo five days later. Christmas on December 25 is considered a Protestant heresy in the mountains; the people hold their own on January 6, which is what we call Twelfth Night in Mobile. We didn't do anything about it there; we just called it Twelfth Night and let it go at that.

Since the Montoyas were more or less back in the chips, there were lots of people for dinner, and Excilda served the meal in shifts, starting at noon. She'd been working on the dinner for three days, cooking at night when she returned from Sagrado, and it was a feast that made an Anglo Christmas dinner look like starvation rations on Devil's Island. There were two
lechoncillos
—that's suckling pig, stuffed with apples and onions and corn meal—and three
guajalotes asados,
which were turkeys surrounded by red chiles and buried in a pit filled with hot rocks for a day or so. That was just for starters, of course. I was sitting next to Victoria at the big table, talking English to her and trying to make conversation in Spanish with an uncle, or a fifth cousin, who had no teeth, when I got a bad case of hiccups and had to go out on the
portal
to hold my breath and stand on my head. Don Carlos was out there, too, eating what appeared to be an elk, or dinosaur, thighbone. When I stood on my head he walked over and licked my face, and I started laughing and fell over, with my hiccups gone. It's complicated, but it's a hiccup cure I'll recommend to anyone.

I went back inside and finished dinner, forcing myself to eat more slowly and decorously. It wasn't an outstanding performance on my part; I could only get down two
empanadas
before the fog closed in, then retired to the big room to lie on the floor and gasp. Victoria sat on the old sofa nearby and looked down at me. "You need some exercise," she said. "You want to walk around?"

"Sorry, I can't move," I told her. "I think I've injured myself."

"You just ate too much," she said. "Come on. Let's go for a walk."

Victoria pulled on my hand while two of her younger brothers pushed from behind, and together they wrestled me onto my feet. They had to hold me while I put my snow boots on; I couldn't seem to bend forward without staggering.

Amadeo came out of the dining room, patting his stomach. "Where you going?" he asked.

"For a walk," Victoria answered. "Josh ate too much."

"You want some exercise, why don't you chop some wood?"

"Aw, Papa, he doesn't want to chop any wood. Nobody chops wood on Christmas."

"Go on, then. Walk. Have a good time."

Don Carlos came with us again, carrying the elephant bone balanced in his jaws. I carried the wrapped package I'd brought to Conejo with me; it was too big to put in my coat pocket, so I carried it under my arm. Victoria was too polite to ask about it. We walked up the road until we could see the next village, Amorcita, from a high point. The little town, almost covered by snow, seemed to be on fire. Thick gray smoke was rising from every house.

"They're burning their
luminarias,"
she told me. "They have a sort of parade every Christmas, in the evening, and everybody lights a bonfire in front of his house. They do it in La Cima, too."

"What's it for?"

"I don't know. Some kind of old custom. Papa told me they used to do it in Conejo and the other towns but they stopped. You want to go up to La Cima and see it tonight? It's pretty."

"You mean walk?"

"No, Papa can drive us, or maybe he'll let you take the truck. The road's okay. Just don't get out of the truck. They're kind of mean up there."

When the wind began to blow harder, we went into an old log barn near the road, and sat on some hay bales. Don Carlos, still gnawing on his dinner, guarded the door.

"I have a present for you," I said. "Merry Christmas." I handed her the package, which had been getting heavy during the walk. She could carry it down.

"I noticed you were carrying something," she said. "Can I open it?"

"Of course. Wait a minute. You
can
read Spanish, can't you?"

"Sure I can read Spanish. What did you think?"

"Okay," I said. "Then Merry Christmas."

The woman at El Chivo Bookstore had had a difficult time finding a Spanish edition of
Don Quixote.
Her regular book-buying channels offered her a variety of translations, but I said it had to be in Spanish, or never mind. She finally got it through the University, and it was a college edition, with a glossary in the back for the out-of-date words. I had written "For the Fair Dulcinea" on the end papers, and signed myself "Don Josué del Corazón Sagrado."

Victoria removed the book from the wrapping paper, weighed it in her hands, read the title, flipped through some pages, and read the inscription.

"Hijo!"
she said. "What is it?"

"What do you mean, 'What is it?' It's a book. It's
Don Quixote."

"For me?"

"Sure, for you. Keepsies."

"To read?"

"If you want to. That was the idea."

"Oh. We already had it in school. About the windmills."

"I'll bet you didn't have the whole book. Look." I riffled through it. "Nine hundred and forty-three pages. In two parts. There's a lot of other stuff beside the windmills in it."

"How come it's in Spanish? The part I read was in English. We have this book down at school, called
Broadening Your Horizons.
It's got a lot of stories and poetry in it. All in English."

"The man who wrote it," I said, "wrote it in Spanish. He was Spanish. They have it translated into a lot of different languages for people who don't know how to read Spanish. But this is the original, just the way Cervantes wrote it."

"Is it hard?"

"It's long," I said. "I wouldn't say it was hard. It rocks along pretty well, especially in the first part."

"I promise to read some every night until I get it finished," she said, "no matter how hard it is."

"I didn't mean it to be work," I told her. "I wanted you to like it. It was supposed to be fun."

"Thank you for the lovely present," she said, as if she were reading the sentence from an unfamiliar script.

"You're welcome."

"Who's this Dulcinea in the front? That's not my name."

"I know it's not," I said. "That was supposed to be fun, too. Dulcinea's the girl in the book, the one Don Quixote fights all his battles for. She's beautiful."

Victoria put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me on the cheek. "You're the first person who ever gave me a present, except for my family," she said. I put my arms around her and kissed her on the lips, and pulled her back onto some loose hay. Don Carlos left his bone and padded over to us, growling.

"Go away, boy," I said. His growl became more urgent, and he put his muzzle next to my ear, to be sure I heard him.

"Good boy," Victoria said, sitting up. "You love me, don't you?" Don Carlos licked her hand and wagged his tail. He loved her all right. "We'd better get home," she said, "before it gets dark. How's your stomach?"

"Much better, thanks," I said. We stood up and brushed the hay off. Victoria picked up her
Don Quixote
and Don Carlos retrieved his bone. When Victoria got married, I hoped the dog wouldn't go on the honeymoon.

Amadeo drove us to La Cima at sunset. It's only fourteen miles or so from Conejo, but it's a tricky drive on a narrow road, and it climbs three thousand feet. In Amorcita, the village Victoria and I had seen from a distance on our walk, the main street was lined with small bonfires, and a group of children were singing in front of someone's house; but there were also some gaudy cardboard Santa Clauses hanging from wires stretched high across the street. It was one of those mixtures that doesn't quite come off.

The snow lay more deeply along the road as we climbed out of Amorcita, and the piñons disappeared, giving way to tall pines and spruce. The cold became sharper, and we were all thankful for the pickup's heater, which roared and made conversation difficult. The stars were very bright. It was easy to see the white, steep country.

"It's pretty up here," I yelled at Amadeo, leaning across Victoria to do so.

"Yeah," he answered. "It's a tough son of a bitch to drive, too."

"Do you get up here often?"

"No," he said. "Not too much. These La Cima people are funny. They don't like strangers to come up here much."

"You're not a stranger."

"Yes I am. They figure if you don't come from La Cima, you're a stranger."

"They talk funny," Victoria said.

"Yeah, they talk Old Spanish," said Amadeo. "It's different. They use a lot of old words. There was a man, a language teacher from the University, came up here a few years ago. Said he was writing a book or something. He rented an old house and talked to the
alcalde
and said he wanted to . . . uh. . . ."

"Interview," Victoria said.

"Yeah, interview people and see how they talked. Then he'd write it down in one of his books. They stole all his tires the first day, and the next day somebody stuck a rag in his gas tank and burned up his car. There aren't any telephones up there, so he couldn't call the sheriff. And every time he came out of the house he was living in, somebody would throw a rock at him. One of the rocks broke his glasses, so he couldn't see good."

"What about the police?"

"The cops don't go up there unless they have to, and they don't like to do it. If somebody gets killed, the people like to handle it themselves. Sometimes the man that did the killing gets killed too, and sometimes he doesn't. They figure it's none of the cops' business."

"What about the professor, from the University?"

"Oh, they didn't kill him. They finally busted into his house and burned all his papers and books. They took all his money, too, and left him just enough for bus fare back to Sagrado. He raised a lot of hell, but there wasn't anybody could do anything. There it is."

We had pulled up onto a stretch of level plateau after a hard climb. Ahead of us, across a steep gorge, was La Cima, perched like an eagle's nest on a bluff, the white peaks shining behind it. A thousand tiny fires made the village glow, and the wind from the mountains brought the sweet smell of pine and piñon smoke to us.

"It's beautiful," I said, and it was. Two hundred years seemed to disappear, and we were back in the days of the viceroys and the Apaches. Only the truck's motor, and the roar of the heater, kept us in the twentieth century. I couldn't tell immediately what it was that made the village look so antique, and Amadeo helped me.

"There's no electricity there," he said. "They use fires and kerosene lamps. They don't want electricity."

He put the truck in low and we started down the valley, the road twisting and bending. At the bottom was a frozen stream crossed by a wooden bridge, and then a Highway Department sign: "Village Limit, La Cima, Pop. 406, Alt. 10,789." Beneath the lettering someone had scrawled
"Chinga todos,"
by way of welcome.

We made it up the last hill to La Cima, slipping and skidding on the snowy road. Amadeo said the state snowplow didn't cover the last half-mile to the top, because when it arrived somebody always stole a piece of gear from it. It sounded like a good place to spend a vacation.