Red Sky at Morning (27 page)

"If you're worried about the responsibility," I said, "I'll sign a paper."

"Let Arnold carry a gun," Steenie said. "I won't need any weapons at all. My Commando training will pay off."

"And you want me to deputize you?"

"Wouldn't that be better?" I asked. "I suppose we could make a citizen's arrest, or whatever they call it, but it would look more official with the badges. I'll just call my mother and tell her. . . ."

"Let me tell you something," Chamaco said. "Before you say one word let me tell you something."

"If you're going to say it's dangerous," Steenie began, "we already know that."

"SHUT UP!" Chamaco stood up and put on his cowboy hat. Then he went to the door and yelled, "Alfonso, come in here." A small, wiry deputy came in, chewing a toothpick. "Yes, sir, Sheriff," he said.

"Alfonso, this is Choshua M. Arnole, white male American, age seventeen. That one is William Estenopolous, white male American, age seventeen. No identifying marks or escars on him; Arnole's got a little round escar on his head. They're a couple of esquirts."

"Yes, sir," Alfonso said.

"It was Arnole found out where Velarde is."

"Yes, sir."

"Him and his buddy want me to make a couple deputies out of them and help me pick him up."

"That right?"

"That one's a Commando or something. This one's a gun-eslinger. They're real dangerous."

"Yes, sir."

"I'm going up there now and get Velarde. You keep these two esquirts here for an hour, then let 'em go home."

"You can't do this," Steenie said. "My father's a. . . ."

"I know," Chamaco said. "Your father's a taxpayer. So's yours," he said to me. "Well, they're gonna get their money's worth today. Alfonso's gonna make sure neither one of you gets killed, and when you go home your mommies are gonna be glad to see you healthy and give you a big dinner and tock you in."

"Are you going to La Cima alone?" I asked. "Hadn't you better take some help?"

"Arnole," Chamaco said, "going to La Cima is the only excitement I get around here. I've been sheriff for twenty-three years, and the only thing I do almost is take care of esquirts. In twenty-three years there's only been three killings in Sagrado. Two of them were second degree—knife-fights in the cantinas—and the other one was man-eslaughter. So there's nothing to do. All I get is esquirts. The esquirts break windows and eslash tires and escare gorls and throw rocks at dogs and write dorty words on the walls. That isn't police work, that's truant-officer work. The magistrate just sends 'em home. Sometimes I get so tired of sitting around that I go out and direct traffic. Sometimes I sit and pray that a Boy Escout gets lost up in the Cordillera so I can organize a search party and get a little riding and hiking time in. And about once a year there's trouble in La Cima that's bad enough for the police to come in, and that's the times I wait for. When I go to La Cima people espit on my car and throw rocks at me. One time somebody even shot at me with a deer rifle, and broke my windshield. It's the only thing that keeps me thinking I'm a law-enforcement officer and not a social worker. And you two esquirts want to take my fun and exercise away from me. If you really want to do me a favor, go out and rob a bank or assassinate the mayor."

"I never looked at it that way, Sheriff," Steenie said. "Good luck up there."

"You esquirts want the county to buy you an ice-cream cone while you're here? It's a little service we give."

"No, thanks," I said.

"Can I call my mouthpiece?" Steenie asked. "This is a bum rap."

"Alfonso, let 'em go at four-twenty," Chamaco said, and left.

We stayed at the sheriffs office for an hour, reading the Wanted posters and fingerprinting each other. Steenie found a copy of the Criminal Code, and we tried to figure out what Tarzan might be wanted for. By stretching what we knew, we finally decided on Assault with a Deadly Weapon, Attempted Murder (First), Statutory Rape, Trespassing on Government Property, Burglary, Breaking and Entering, Possession of Liquor by a Minor, a possible charge of Draft-Dodging and Operating a Vehicle without a License. Unless he were asleep when Chamaco arrived, we guessed that he would add Resisting Arrest to the list.

At home, that night, I kept the radio turned on for news of the events in La Cima, but everything was about the war. The local radio station didn't have any news department anyway, and the reporters on
The Conquistador
either hadn't heard about Tarzan, or had lost interest in him. In Europe the countryside was thawing and we were beginning to move again, with The Bulge straightened out. The Germans had blown up all the bridges across the Rhine except one, and we had put some infantry across it. I guessed that a Nazi engineering officer was standing at attention in front of a field marshal saying, "But . . . but . . . but . . . ." You can't win 'em all, Corporal Hitler.
Jawohl.
But there was nothing about Tarzan until the paper came out the next afternoon.

Chamaco could have used some help. Not help from me and Steenie, maybe, but some. We heard what happened the next day. He took a county automobile into La Cima, turned it around and parked it heading downhill, and walked to the cousin's house. Tarzan didn't try to run; according to the report he was lying on a cot, whittling on a piece of wood with his
hojita,
when Chamaco opened the door and said, "Come on, Tarzan." Velarde came outside with him, to the single road that runs through the town, and as they started to walk toward the police car, with most of the population watching quietly, Tarzan spun around and slashed Chamaco with a knife. He had aimed for the eyes but missed, and opened a long half-moon cut across his forehead, from eyebrow to eyebrow. A great flap of flesh fell over Chamaco's eyes, and blood poured over his face and jacket. He said in a tired, bored voice, "Oh, goddamn it," stepped back and pushed the flap of forehead up with his left hand, waited until his vision cleared, and shot Tarzan in the right shoulder, at approximately the point where a duck-shooter rests the butt of his shotgun. Tarzan sat down and screamed and Chamaco stood there and watched him, holding his head together with his free hand and bleeding. Nobody came to help him or Tarzan. Nobody moved, and the tableau remained static for five or ten minutes. It was obvious, after a while, that Tarzan wasn't going anywhere, and Chamaco tried to find someone who would drive his police car back to Sagrado. The people he asked swore they didn't know how to drive. There was no help at all. And then the blue bus came rattling and jiggling into La Cima, several hours late because of gasket trouble. Chamaco and the bus driver loaded Tarzan aboard, and they made it back to town by sunset with Tarzan screaming whenever the bus hit a bump.

Spring came and retreated several times during March and April. Robins moved in and then froze; showers turned to hail, followed by snow.
The Conquistador
did a picture page—"Sagrado Spring Fever"—with all the springtime clichés: Little boys playing marbles, early lilac blooms, free-running streams, the first sandlot baseball game of the year. When the photographs were printed, two days after they were taken, there was a foot of new snow on the ground, the lilacs had turned black and nobody could find second base. Sagrado was at the right latitude for spring, but the altitude was wrong.

There were other timely and interesting stories in the newspaper. An Associated Press dispatch from Muleshoe, Texas, ran under the headline "Former Sagrado Man Injured," and told of a John Cloyd who'd been struck down by a milk truck in Muleshoe, and was now recovering slowly from a wrenched back. We were happy to hear that he was back in business; he'd need the money to support his grandchildren. An Army public-information office release, in a later edition, reported that Pvt. Buckminster Swenson, former athletic great at De Crispin High School, had been named Recruit of the Month at Camp Chaffee, Arkansas, and had fired Marksman at the rifle range. "I knew we judged him unfairly," Steenie noted. "He's got all the makings of a corporal."

In April, a neighbor discovered the body of Mrs. De Crispin in her big, gloomy house. The coroner said it was a heart attack, not uncommon in a woman of her age— it was only eighty-seven, we learned—and he reported that she went out peacefully. None of us believed that; when she was found, lying on the pillows around her living-room cooking fire, she was holding a decorated Comanche lance, a genuine collector's item, to which were attached three old Kiowa scalps in good condition. Everyone in school was let out early for her funeral. Her will called for an Indian ceremony, but the Pueblo people around Sagrado, who had always thought of her as bad luck, wouldn't cooperate. Marcia's father read the service, the standard passage from the
Book of Common Prayer,
and an eloquent abridgment of Chief Joseph's speech of surrender to General Howard and Colonel Miles at the Bear Paw. "Hear me, my chiefs. I have fought; but from where the sun now stands, I will fight no more, forever." We thought of it as a decent and touching gesture, Episcopal in spirit if not in content, as Marcia described it later, tearfully.

Romeo Bonino came to the funeral, too, and admitted great sadness at the loss of his early patroness. "She might have supported me for years if I'd had just a little Indian blood," he said. "On the other hand, where would art be today if Michelangelo had been a Comanche? These things must balance out, somehow."

With Romeo was his new model, a large, smiling redhead named Gwendolyn, who, he told us, had been a cherished figure in all the ateliers on Royal Street in New Orleans before the high water content in the Louisiana air began to give her the constant sensation of drowning. "We've got her pretty well dried out now, haven't we, Gwendolyn?"

"Yes, dawlin'," she said, squeezing his arm.

"Say 'superb,' " he said.

"Supabe."

"Say 'bird.' "

"Bade."

"Now there's an accent I can live with," he said. "And God, can she cook! What was that thing you did last night?"

"That wasn't anything but
gumbo aux herbes,
sugah," she said. "That's chahld's play. Wait'll Ah cook you a
doberge."

"Ever hear anything like that in your life, Josh?" he asked me. "Soft and sweet like honey. Josh, when are you coming over for dinner?"

"You call me when she cooks red beans and rice," I said, "and I'll bring a bottle of claret, no matter what Dad says."

Gwendolyn began to complain of the cold—a lot of people from the South, I've noticed, tend to start freezing when the temperature drops below 85 degrees—and Romeo escorted her from graveside to his waiting truck outside the cemetery.

"I think that one might turn out to be permanent," I said. "That Creole cooking may just do it."

"She didn't have a brassiere on," Marcia said. "Did you notice?"

"You mean she's a brazen hussy?" Steenie suggested.

"Well, it's just plain lewd. And at a funeral, too."

"It's too bad she didn't come in her modeling costume," I said, "wearing nothing but a fixed stare. I think you're still put out that Romeo wouldn't let you model for him."

"Great sculpture requires a bosom," Steenie said. "Look at Venus de Milo."

"Look at all those big Dutch farm girls by Rubens," I suggested.

"You look at them," Marcia said, pouting. "All those glands get you in trouble when you're about forty."

The cemetery was on a low hill north of the town, with a fine view for the corpses, if they were interested, of the Cordillera and the valley. Patches of snow still lay in the shadows, and the mountaintops were pure white. In the valley, trees were starting to green, but they were bare in Sagrado. It was such a pretty town, even-in the last of winter, the soft tans and grays seeming to grow naturally from the earth. Nothing soared, nothing stuck out. Even the school, clearly visible from the hill we stood on, was partly obscured by leafless trees, and gave the foreign-looking town a comforting, American note, like a Nebraska railroad depot.

"How many people in Sagrado?" I asked Steenie as we walked slowly down from the cemetery.

"I don't know," he said. "Seven or eight thousand. My father said it hasn't grown much since he's been here, that's since nineteen twenty-five. He was the second Anglo doctor in Sagrado, he told me once. He couldn't get used to being called an Anglo; said it was an insult to a Greek. Something to do with politics. The population was almost all Spanish, then. Both Senators were Spanish; the kids in school were still having a bad time with English."

"It'll get bigger after the war," Marcia said. "You watch. All those guys will come home and want to change things. They'll pave all the streets."

"God, I hope not," I said. "I love it just the way it is. In a place like this, you feel you can. . . ."

"Hide," she said. "I know. Hide from a war, hide from cities, hide from people scrambling around, hide from little brick houses with front porches, hide from rich people who sling their money around like a baseball bat. Oh!" She touched my arm. "I don't mean you. Your father's not like that. He used to come here because he liked to get away from Mobile in the summer. You know, my father used to play chess with yours. Mr. Arnold would come to the rectory sometimes and play, or they'd walk down to the Plaza and sit on a bench and play there."

"I know," I said. "He always told me he was going to come here for good when he retired. He was going to do what Ulysses did, he said—walk inland with an oar on his shoulder, and settle in a place where nobody knew what the oar was for."

On Zebulon Pike Street we watched an old man with a string of burros pass by slowly and fragrantly. Each burro carried an impossible load of piñon wood, cut into fireplace lengths, and the old man talked to them softly in Spanish, threatening them gently with excommunication and mutilation.

"His son's probably working in a plant in Phoenix," Steenie said, "and I'll bet his grandson's in the Army. When the war's over, they're not going to be interested in the wood business any more. Pretty soon there aren't going to be any more burros, except in zoos, and everybody in Sagrado's going to have central heating. They're going to tear down all the adobe houses and put up new plastic models. First guy they hear speaking Spanish, they're going to take away his membership in the Rotary Club, and make him turn in his Moose tooth, or whatever it is."