Red Sky at Morning (22 page)

Like the other mountain villages, La Cima had just one street. It curved along the top of a narrow ridge, faced on both sides by thick-looking houses built of heavy logs with mud chinking. Many of them seemed to have no windows at all; others had hide stretched tightly over small square holes, the hide oiled to let light through. Apparently the only outsider the La Cima citizens had allowed to stay for a while was a galvanized tin salesman. All the roofs were of corrugated metal, pitched steeply like those on Swiss chalets, shining dully in the firelight. The snow had fallen deeply and heavily here, and had slid off the roofs and piled high between the houses.

The level summit of the ridge was no more than a hundred feet wide, enough for the road and the front rooms of the houses. Then the land dropped off sharply, and I could see that a house one level in front was two or three levels high in back, the rear portions braced and buttressed against gravity by lodge poles and boulders. The dark houses seemed to belly up against the slope, like animals standing on their hind legs to feed on whatever came along the road.

Most of the adult population of La Cima stood or leaned against the houses on our left as we drove to the center of the village and parked. It was very cold. The men and women wore dark blankets over their shoulders, holding them closed with their hands in front. They were watching the scene on the other side of the street, a little drama which moved toward us from house to house.

Thirty or forty children, many of them carrying burning sticks for torches, swarmed and eddied down the narrow street, chanting something in a tune that seemed to have only three or four notes, none of them recognizable as music. With them was a couple: an old man with a short, dirty white beard, who walked with the aid of a cane, and a handsome young woman, dressed lightly for the weather in a print dress. The woman was enormously pregnant—I'd have said fourteen months along, if it were possible—and pushed her belly before her like a wheelbarrow full of melons. The old man supported one of her elbows, a young boy the other. She was wearing, as her only concession to the weather, a floppy pair of hiking boots, with the laces undone and hanging loose. As the group approached, I could see that some of the children were leading a burro.

"Even a Protestant ought to be able to get the idea," Victoria said.

The children halted before a house and began to sing again. I couldn't make out the words, but Amadeo murmured a rough translation for me:

"The night is very cold
We have traveled a long way
The woman needs to lie down
Her feet are bleeding.
With her is an old man
He walks with difficulty
Please open your door
And give us shelter and food."

When the children finished the song, the couple walked heavily to the door and the old man rapped on it with his cane. It opened immediately, and a woman came out shouting and cursing rapidly in the strange Spanish. Then she threw a pan of water on the pregnant woman and slammed the door.

"She said, "There's no room here and stop tracking up my yard,'" Amadeo translated. "That's leaving out the bad language."

They moved to another house and repeated the song. This time a man and woman came out, and while the woman yelled and cursed, the man kicked the burro, who brayed in pain.

We were parked at the side of the road, near La Cima's only filling station, dark and shuttered, with one hand-crank gas pump. When the children and couple approached it, Amadeo started the pickup and backed into a snow-filled alley at one side of the station, making sure that his truck got in no one's way. The group collected near the pumps, the pregnant woman shivering in her wet dress. The observers across the road slowly detached themselves from walls and walked toward us, each man carrying a piece of wood or a tree branch. One by one, the men knelt in the open space in front of the filling station and placed his wood on the ground, beginning with a rectangle and building it higher until it was a cubical pile. The old man with the cane picked up a pail and slowly cranked gasoline into it, then carefully walked to the pile of wood and soaked it. The children tossed their burning torches, and the fire whoofed up, bringing with it a strong smell of gas, which slowly receded as the wood caught. No one paid any attention to us or the pickup, which I found comforting.

The fire lit hundreds of dark, shining faces, all expressionless except the children's, which had rapt, excited looks. Two or three of the men, huddled together near the blaze, began to play tiny flutes, short, homemade instruments with just a few finger holes, and the crowd started singing. I recognized it dimly; I'd heard the choir in Lacey's Catholic church in Mobile singing the same thing, but I couldn't remember the name of it. It had a different tone here in La Cima; it sounded Oriental, or Arabic, and the words were in Spanish instead of Latin.

"Weird, huh?" Victoria said, and her father shushed her.

The crowd, which circled the bonfire, parted at one side, and four large men came into the ring, pulling fiercely on lengths of chain. They pulled and stumbled and sweated in the firelight, and into the circle they dragged a black bear, a big one. The singing stopped, and a murmur went up from the people. The only words I could catch were
"Oso santo."

"What's this all about?" I whispered to Amadeo.

"I don't know," he said. "I'm a Catholic. Just don't get out of the truck."

"Don't worry," I said. "I'm not about to."

The bear was snuffling and swinging its head from side to side, as the four men pulled at the chains attached to its wide leather collar. Parker had told me that black bears weren't particularly dangerous, unless they fell on you or if you got cute with their cubs. They ate berries and honey and had never developed a taste for people as had browns and grizzlies, now happily extinct in the area. This one looked big and dangerous to me, though. It had heavy shoulders much higher than its rump, 3-inch-long claws, and a look of impatience that was turning into downright irritation. I wondered whether it was kept in a cage for the annual show, or if the people of La Cima trapped a new one every year, and was about to ask when the pregnant woman stepped carefully into the circle of firelight.

Now, beside her thin wet dress and boots, she wore a pair of canvas work gloves—for bite protection, I guessed—and a crown made of wreathed evergreens. It was a ridiculous costume, but something about her, her huge belly, perhaps, or her serene expression, kept it from being funny. She approached the tethered bear with no sign of fear, walked around the men who were holding the animal and, raising her wet dress almost to her hips, clumsily straddled the bear's wide back.

The crowd was silent, the men struggled noiselessly with their chains, and the woman on the bear stroked its thick neck and whispered to it, leaning forward on its shoulder hump. Amadeo was watching intently, with a faint look of disapproval. Victoria was hiding her eyes. There was no sound except the sharp cracking of the fire and the bear's panting.

There was no singing now. All the faces in the densely ranged crowd were turned toward the woman and the bear, watchful, intent; all but one face, which was puzzled and seemed slightly horrified. A dark, pretty face.

"Hey," I said to Victoria, "I know that girl." Without thinking I opened the truck door and stepped down. Amadeo grabbed for me, and said, "Jesus Christ!"

I had trotted partly around the circle when my mind, numbed as usual by the low temperature, told me where I was and what I was doing. By then, I had already called "Viola!" and it was too late.

She pulled her eyes away from the bear and looked at me, with confusion and then recognition. I was only a few feet away, and I saw that she was terrified. She put her hand over her face, turned and started to run toward the shadows across the road. Someone pushed me, and then another, and I fell on my knees in the road. Then people were kicking me. I rolled over on my back, and saw a ring of angry faces and a lot of boots. Some faces came close to mine and spat.

Two men grasped my ankles and dragged me roughly back to the truck, where Amadeo and Victoria were standing with pale, frightened faces. The men dropped my feet, and one of them shoved Amadeo against the truck door. "Get him outa here," he said in English. "Get the hell outa here right now."

We got in and slammed the doors, and Amadeo drove slowly and carefully around the ring of people. Some of them watched us leave, but most had turned back to the woman, who still rode the bear and talked to him. My ribs hurt when I reached for a handkerchief to wipe the melted snow and spittle from my face. Victoria had begun to cry.

"You all right?" Amadeo said.

"Yeah, I'm all right. I'm sorry."

"Boy, you could have gotten us all killed back there, you know that?"

"I know. I'm really sorry."

"What made you jump out of the track like that? I told you to stay inside."

"I saw somebody I knew, a girl I go to school with in Sagrado. I wasn't thinking when I got out."

"You think anything's broken? They were kicking you pretty hard when they had you down."

"My ribs are sore. I don't think they broke any. They're rough up there, aren't they?"

"That's what I've been telling you," Amadeo said.

Victoria had stopped crying by the time we drove into Amorcita, and we held hands the rest of the way to Conejo, our linked hands on the seat between us so that Amadeo couldn't see.

I slept that night in the Montoyas' living room in a bedroll, near the fireplace. Excilda made me take off my shirt so that she could see the damage. She agreed that nothing was broken, but bruises were starting to show and she rubbed them with horse liniment, which stung sharply and had a powerful, pungent smell. She and Victoria told me I was very brave, but Amadeo kept insisting that I was only stupid, which was nearer the truth.

When the household got settled down, and the dozen kids packed off in the warren of bedrooms, I lay looking into the firelight, nursing my sore ribs, and wondering what the hell Viola Lopez was doing at the Christmas bear-riding ceremony in La Cima. She had always been the most devout girl at school, a future nun, engaged to Jesus, as I understood it. Well, I'd ask Chango about it Monday.

It was near midnight when I got quietly out of the bedroll and pushed open the door to Victoria's room. There was enough light through a window to see her, sleeping on her side, her thick black hair on the pillow. It was light enough, too, to see Don Carlos lying beside her slippers, his head raised, looking at me calmly. I backed out of the room and closed the door softly. "Here, boy," I whispered, "here's your nice hamburger with the nice strychnine in it. Yum yum." Then I got back into the bedroll, and went to sleep on the side that hurt less.

Chango said: "Viola? Amigo, you're crazy."

"Chango, I'm telling you it was Viola. I couldn't have mistaken her. It wasn't just the face, it was . . . you know." I cupped my hands in front, and waited for him to hit me, but he only nodded.

"Sometimes at night she goes over to the convent," he said. "It's for some kind of instruction. She wants to take orders after she gets out of school, and the nuns are teaching her stuff."

"She was in La Cima about eight o'clock Saturday night," I repeated. "Standing with a crowd of people around a fire, watching some sort of business with a bear. I don't know. Maybe it's a kind of instruction, but I didn't see any priest with her."

"She was staying with a friend Saturday night," he said.

"Don't take my word for it. Ask her."

"I'll talk to her tonight. She stayed home today," he said.

We were in Social Studies class that afternoon, soaking up those little-known facts about the Lame Duck Amendment, when we heard the yelling in the corridor, and Black John Cloyd came roaring in with Ratoncito yapping at his heels. Cloyd had his shotgun and he was still limping somewhat, although his cast was off.

"If you'll please come to my office," the principal was saying, "I'm sure we can. . . ."

"Shut up, you little jay fart," Cloyd said. "You ask them kids or by Jesus I'll ask 'em with this." He brandished the gun.

Ratoncito fiddled with his little bow tie and cleared his throat. "Boys and girls," he began, and then stopped and turned red. "I can't just ask them like this," he said to Cloyd. "I'm sure there must be. . . ."

"Then I'll ask 'em," Cloyd said. "Git!" He pointed the shotgun at Ratoncito, who turned pale and left the room. Mrs. Loughran was still standing at the blackboard, the chalk in her hand, arrested and apparently hypnotized by the scene. She had just written "Ratified. February 6, 1933."

Cloyd was wearing the same black hat I'd seen when Parker and I had gone to pick up the girls. I'd heard that his suit had been thrown out of court, and that he wasn't going to get a nickel for his back, and no more than expenses for the leg, which had probably helped to put him in a sour humor.

"Alrighty," he said. "I want all the girls over on that side of the room—" he pointed to the side with the windows—"and all the boys over to the other side. Lively, goddamn it!"

It was like a spelling bee as we shuffled to our directed posts, boys against the girls. As usual, Marcia thought the whole thing was exciting, and her eyes danced. Steenie and I stood together near the wall, and he whispered, "Go take his gun away, Josh. Use the hold I taught you, the arm-breaker."

"You do it," I suggested. "I haven't got it down yet."

"Next feller that talks is gonna git his ass blowed off," Cloyd said conversationally.

Bucky Swenson detached himself from the row of boys and faced Mr. Cloyd, pale but brave, the picture of virtue. "Surely you are aware, sir," he started, but Cloyd pulled down on him and said, "I'd as lief it was your ass as somebody's else." Swenson stood there a second or two longer, to show he was not afraid, and stepped back into line.

"Alrighty," Cloyd said again. "Somebody's been diddling my two girls, and I want to know who. I figure it's one of you fellers took their advantage. I want him to answer up smart, so I can blow his head off." Mrs. Loughran dropped her piece of chalk, but there was no other sound.