Ride the Pink Horse (7 page)

His big hand, his swaying bulk nudged Sailor towards the center pole of the merry-go-round. “You are my friend,” he chanted. He took his hand away, bent swaying over a pile of dirty rags by the pole. He didn’t fall, he lurched perilously but it was with a dancer’s grace he swooped up one of the rags, stood straight again. “For you my serape,” he said. He held up the dirty rag with moist-eyed affection. A long piece of wool, woven of colored stripes that were ravaged by dirt and night into only light and dark. Tenderly he held it to Sailor. “For you, mi amigo. Wrap it about you and you will be warm this night.”

Sailor took it. Awkwardly. Reluctant. There was nothing else he could do. Not without hurting the old goat’s feelings. He’d hurt plenty of people in his life, sure; but he didn’t want to hurt this poor old goat. He took the serape but he didn’t wrap it around him. He said, “I’m warm enough. I got a coat, see? You take it. You need it.”

“No, no.” Pancho shook his head. With the movement he wobbled on his big bare feet. “By your friendship I am kept warm.” He stepped aside. “Wrap it about you and lie here.”

Sailor broke in. “Here? On the ground?” His fist closed on the dirty serape. “You mean you sleep here?”

“But yes,” Pancho said. He scowled. “Could I sleep closed into walls, in the bed where many have sleeped, many have died? No, no, no! I sleep where I may breathe, Señor Sailor. Tonight you will sleep with me, no? Where you may breathe and dream good dreams.”

For Christ’s sake. He didn’t curse aloud. For a bed on the ground he’d spent hours listening to a conglomeration of broken English and Spanish, for this he’d drunk tequila, for this he’d endured an old peon’s ideas of the world he lived in. To lie on the ground. Like an Indian. While the Sen lay in La Fonda, on clean sheets, in a seven-dollar-a-day bed.

“You did not think I have a room?” Pancho asked anxiously. “You did not think I would trust my little ponies to the thieves in the night?”

He’d never slept on the ground in his life. He’d been poor, he’d been slum poor, but he’d never slept without a roof over his head. He was burned up but when his eyes met Pancho’s saddened eyes, he lied. He didn’t know why he lied. Maybe the tequila had made him dopey. He said, “This suits me,” and watched the happiness seep back into the brown brigand face. “Suits me fine.”

Pancho used his toes to push forward a hunk of gunny sack. “That is good, Here is the pillow for your head. Wrap the serape about you so.” He pantomimed. “You will sleep well, my friend.”

Sailor wrapped it about him so. He got down awkwardly as a camel on the earth. He didn’t take off his hat when he lay on the gunny sack. Bad enough to be wrapped in this flea-bitten rag. No telling what was on the sacking.

“You are comfortable, no?” Pancho asked.

No, he said in his brain and aloud, “I’m fine.”

Pancho knelt like a graceful elephant beside him. He made prayer. Spanish prayer. God be with us. The saints preserve and bless us. He stretched himself out on the earth, his arms beneath his head. “It is good to sleep beneath the stars. Goodnight, my friend,” he said. He closed his eyes and he was asleep. Asleep and snoring.

Under the stars. The crazy old coot. They were under the canopy of the merry-go-round. Not a star in sight. Ignacio and Onofre were in a room. Pila was in a room. The girls who earlier lay on the Federal Building lawn were in their rooms. The baby face who’d given him the eye in the restaurant was in a room. McIntyre had a room and the gorilla waiter had a room and the Sen had a seven-dollar-a-day room in the best hotel in town. Everyone sleeping in a room, in a bed, except the Indians who didn’t care because two thousand years from now there wouldn’t be any rooms or any beds or any Gringos or Mexicans to sleep in them. Everyone but the crazy Indians and a crazy old fool who was half and half, Indian and Spanish, and the wise guy from Chicago who thought he was finding a bed by sticking with him.

The ground was hard and Pancho’s snores were lusty. The serape scratched and bit. And Sailor’s rage against the Sen bit harder, like an aching tooth, scratched like hair cloth. The Sen would pay. He’d pay for all the indignities but he’d pay heavy for making Sailor sleep on the hard ground. Like an Indian. Like a crazy halfbreed spic brigand. Like a dog.

The leaves of the tall trees in the park rustled like rain. Afar there were snatches of laughter and aftermath of deeper silences. The wind was a small cool sound through the shadowed Plaza. Pancho snored. A dog bayed at the loneliness of night; a chorus answered with sharp-toothed barking; silence closed again over night. The silence from the museum portal was deeper than the dark there. No one living could be in that dark, that silence. Maybe that was the secret in stone; the Indians were not living; they were spirits from a long forgotten day, walking the earth, waiting. Waiting in knowledge that they alone would not pass, the excretions of the white man would pass away and they would remain.

The loneness, the lack of identity that had terrified him twice tonight, once in remembering the past through Pila’s face, later in that moment of dark and silence on the hooded, unfamiliar street, stabbed again. He rose up, but slowly he sank down again on to the ground. Pancho was there beside him. The wooden ponies were quivering gently. The Plaza was unchanged.

Sleep came into him because he was too tired to allow discomfort to put it to rout. Even the tremble of an unknown fear, the anger at his present humiliation, could not banish it. He closed his eyes, the tightness went out of him. He drifted between the hard earth and the cradle of oblivion. He was drifting into blissful oblivion when through his closed eyes the gray-white face of Zozobra floated above him. The dead eyes burned, the hideous mouth croaked. I am evil. I am the spirit of this alien land.
Go away. Go away before all good becomes evil. All is evil. Go away. It’s going to rain. I’m going to spoil your fun. . . .

He knew he was asleep but he couldn’t wake up. He couldn’t get away from the obscene floating face. Fire billowed higher, higher, but even fire couldn’t destroy the evil thing. He knew he was asleep and then—he was asleep.

II

Procession

1

He waked to the clangor of church bells, bright and strong as sunshine they rang in the chill of early morning air. Pancho was rolling on one elbow. His sleep-sanded eyes blinked happily at Sailor.

“It is morning,” Pancho announced. He lumbered to his feet, hitching his jeans up over his fat hips. He yawned and stretched and shook off sleep as a dog shaking off water. “A good morning, my friend. Señor Sailor. The little birds are singing songs in the tree tops—”

Sailor glinted at his watch. Not quite six o’clock. They had talked, Pancho had talked, to past three. He muttered, “Church bells,” and closed his eyes. He heard the birds as he eyes closed; they weren’t singing, they were setting up an infernal twittering din. Clang clang twitter twitter tweet. He pulled the serape up under his chin and grasped for sleep.

When he waked again the church bells were still ringing. Loud and strong but his watch said eight and now the sun lay in bright patches on the green Plaza. Sailor sat up, flung aside the dirty serape, dug under his coat and scratched his shoulders.

Pancho said, “You sleep well, my friend?” He was sitting on Ignacio’s camp stool, chewing a doughnut. Sugar frosted his lips.

“Not exactly The Stevens,” Sailor grinned back. The big man didn’t know what he was talking about. “But I feel pretty good.” He stretched and yawned, breaking off when the two girls crossing the Plaza gave him the eye and giggled to each other. They were all dressed up in cheap silk dresses, pink and turquoise-blue silk. They teetered on high-heeled white sandals and they had dabs of white straw on their black hair. Their mouths were painted. Peasants off to early morning Mass.

Eight o’clock, kid’s Mass. The bells would be ringing and the old lady would nag:
Hurry, hurry, hurry. That’s the first bell. You haven’t your shoes laced yet your neck washed yet your coat buttoned yet. . . you’ll be late for Mass. Hurry, hurry, hurry.

The old man would be shaving, he shaved on Sundays, his face the color of raw beef. How he could stand on his feet after Saturday night’s binge was a marvel to the kids. It slowed them up on Sundays. He honed the razor on the thick strap and scraped the gray pig-bristles off his face. Sounded like sandpaper scraping against itself.
Hurry, hurry, hurry. That’s the last bell. Do you have your prayer book your rosary your penny your handkerchief . . . you’ll be late to Mass. Hurry hurry hurry.

The kids stumbling on ahead, clumping shoes shined blackly, faces shined raw with yellow soap. The old lady in her Sunday black, mincing fast behind them in her Sunday shoes, high laced black shoes with pointed toes pinching her feet. She’d take off the shoes when she got home from church, put on the old felt slippers, one pompom gone, the color they’d once had turned dirt gray in the soot and grime of a Chicago tenement. The old man striding along a little in front of her in his black serge, too tight about the middle; the good suit he’d bought years ago when he worked at the yards and was an upstanding young fellow. Too many years ago for the kids to remember. The old man swaggering along like he was the Lord High God of the Universe they were going to the slum church to pray to, not the old souse who stole the money the old lady brought home for bread, brought home in the wan weary dawn hour after scrubbing marble floors all night.
Hurry, hurry, hurry. . .

The church was only around the corner and they made it as the last bell was an echo, marching down the aisle together, the old man and the old lady and the kids, the eight kids. Eight kids and not enough bread for one. Kneeling together, praying together, marching out again into the cold gloomy Chicago Sunday. The hot sweating Chicago Sunday.

“It’s a fine family you have there, Mr. . . .”

The old man puffing himself up and accepting the compliments on the church steps and the old lady smirking timidly and fingering her worn black gloves. She blacked them with shoe blacking on Saturday nights. The kids standing like clodhoppers with their welts itching under their sawtoothed winter underwear, under their sweaty summer floursacks.

The priest in his stained cassock looking like a pale, pious, nearsighted saint. Saints didn’t belong in a slum church; there ought to have been a fighting priest like an avenging angel with a fiery sword. To whack the old man down. To strike the old man and his sanctimonious Sunday smile dead on the church steps.

The pale, near-sighted saint priest and the waxen saintly nuns preaching and teaching about the Lord Jesus and the kids trying to sit still on their blistered backsides and their stomachs crying for want of bread. If you didn’t sit still you had to stay in after school unless the nun with the wart was your teacher and then you just got a whack on the head with a ruler. Maybe she knew about the blistered backsides and the welts on the kids’ backs, maybe that’s why she whacked the ruler on the kids’ heads. Maybe she’d been a slum kid before she was a nun. Maybe she whacked them to keep from weeping over them. Slum kids didn’t want weeps over them.

But none of that was the reason he quit the parochial school, quit on his own and the truant officer picked him up after four days and took him to the old man and the old man’s eyes were like red rat eyes when he took off his belt and slowly moved forward. That was the time he used the knife on the old man. The old man half-killed him and he didn’t kill the old man though he wanted to. He cut up the old man and they sent him to reform school as a criminal kid. They didn’t do anything to the old man but patch him up.

Reform school was better than home. Three meals a day and you didn’t get beaten for no reason. You learned how to steal cars and you smoked cigarettes if you didn’t get caught. That was the first time he went to reform school. It wasn’t the last time. The last time he didn’t stay long. They let him out when the old man died. The old lady cried like a baby, like the old man had been good to her. She wore a mourning veil over her face. It hid her crying and the shiner the old man had given her before he dropped dead. The other kids went to the funeral but he didn’t. He went to the pool hall and one day he met the Sen.

The clangorous bells rang out and he scratched himself and watched the stragglers hurrying across the Plaza and up the sun bright street.
Hurry Hurry Hurry.
He didn’t have to hurry. The last time he’d been in church was when the old lady died. Cancer, the doc said. The doc should have said she’d just worn out. On her knees scrubbing marble floors all week, on her knees in church on Sundays.

That was why he’d run off from the parochial school. Because he wouldn’t get down on his knees every morning, noon, and afternoon and thank God for his blessings. Thank God for the vicious rats in the walls and an obscene old man who beat the hell out of his kids. Thank God for his mother killing herself trying to feed eight kids. Thank God for not enough to eat, for dirt, for shivering winter, for stifling summer, for bad teeth, for pains in the belly, for never enough to eat. Maybe if he was an Indian it would have been all right. He’d have known in time it didn’t matter. Poverty, cruelty, injustice were excretions; time would take care of them. You could sit up there on a cloud pillow twanging a harp and laugh like hell in two thousand years. Or stop stoking a fiery pit long enough for a snicker. Screwball philosophy. But old Pancho meant well. He was friendly as a puppy, holding out his sack of stale doughnuts, urging, “Go on. Have something to eat.”

“No, thanks,” he said. He took off his hat, pushed back his dark hair, settled the hat again. He shook the kinks out of his legs. “I got to be about my business.”

“You slept well, no?” Pancho was anxious, chewing the rubbery doughnut.

“Slept fine,” sailor said. “Feel like a new man.” Funny thing was he did feel pretty good. Awake and alive and the air, hot and crisp both, pumping into his lungs.

“That is good,” Pancho beamed. ‘You will be back?”

“Sure. Be seeing you.” He turned and walked out of the Plaza towards the hotel where his bag better be safe. He was himself again. A night on the ground hadn’t changed that. He was himself and all he needed was to get cleaned up, have a cup of coffee, and he’d be ready to face the Sen.

There were, this early, old women in the little thatched booths, building the fires, opening locked cases, setting out the sucker bait, the flimsy yellow birds on their sticks, the canes and the balloons, the black hats with the red and yellow and green bobbles. McIntyre wasn’t a bad guy; he’d bought his hat off a booth on the Plaza. He wasn’t like the Sen, hiring a dressmaker to fix him up in satins and velvets like a Spanish grandee, price no object, and trying to rat out on a business deal.

Sailor strode across the street, climbed up the high curb to the sidewalk. He went in the hotel. The big shirt-sleeved guy was back behind the desk, looking glum, too much Fiesta. He eyed Sailor. “You didn’t pick up your bag.”

Sailor leaned his elbows on the counter. “Couldn’t find a room,” he said. “Had to sit up all night. You couldn’t fix me up today, could you?”

“Naw,” he growled. But he wasn’t mean, he was hopeless. “I got ‘em sleeping in shifts now. You know anybodyll give you a shift, it’s okay by me.”

“Don’t know a soul in town,” Sailor said cheerfully. “Aren’t any of them moving out today?”

“Naw. Nobody’s going to budge till Fiesta’s over.”

“You mean it goes on?” He hadn’t read that pink piece of paper crumpled in his pocket. He’d taken it for granted Fiesta was like the Fourth of July or Memorial Day or something.

‘Today and tomorrow,” the clerk said bitterly.

Sailor echoed the bitterness for the moment. Then he remembered. He’d get his business done and move on. To Albuquerque, El Paso, across the border. He didn’t have to stick around here. “Listen,” he began. “Look at me. I been in the Plaza all night. I got to see a guy on business this morning. A big shot. I can’t go looking like this. I haven’t had my clothes off for four days. I stink.”

The guy’s face agreed gloomily.

“All I want is a shower and a shave.” He dug into his pocket Took out a five. You couldn’t offer a hardbitten Gringo a one. You wouldn’t get any place if you did. This guy wasn’t mi amigo; he was clerk-bouncer in a cheap hotel. “You’ve got a room here. Just let me go wash up in your room. That’s all.”

The guy eyed the fiver with the right look. “I don’t know,” he began. “I sleep on shift with the night guy.”

Sailor covered the bill in his fingers, began to inch it off the counter.

“He’s out having breakfast now,” the guy said hurriedly. “If he gets back, I could keep him down here a while.” He stood up. “You make it snappy,” he ordered. “I’ll keep him down here.” So he wouldn’t have to split. He pushed Sailor’s bag out from under the counter. “Come on.” He didn’t offer to lug it. Sailor picked it up; the locks hadn’t been tampered with.

He followed the guy up the steep uncarpeted stairs to the floor above. The guy took a key out of his pocket and unlocked a door just off the head of the stairs. A dinky room with an unmade single bed, men’s neckties on the oak bureau, a couple of chairs with clothes flung on them. Nothing fancy but a room and it looked good. Sailor set down his bag easy on the dusty carpet. Not that he cared about stirring up the ancient dust; he didn’t want the bag’s weight to sound.

The guy held out his hand for the five.

“Sure,” Sailor said easy. He started to hand it over but he waited. “Look at this suit.” He eyed it himself in the mirror. It looked as if he’d slept in it for a week, in a sticky bus seat, on the ground with leaves and grass and dirt rolling in it. “I can’t talk business with a big shot looking like this.” He reached in his pocket and took out a one, handed both to the clerk. “You can get it pressed for me.”

“It’s Sunday,” the guy said. But he shoved both bills in his pocket.

“Sure, but this is a hotel.” Sailor eeled out of the coat jacket. He carried it to the bureau and emptied the left-hand pocket, a crumpled pink slip of paper, the Fiesta program; a mashed pack of Philip Morris, two cigarettes left; a paper folder of matches, Raton hotel. He slid the gun into his right hand while he fussed with the left-hand pocket. And he kept talking fast. “Hotels got tailors who’ll press suits on a Sunday. Wish I could get it cleaned, maybe he can spot it a little.” He slid the gun out and under the pink paper and he didn’t think the guy saw. He faced him again quick, his shoulders hiding what was cluttering the bureau, unhooked his belt and unbuttoned his pants. “You can send somebody out with it. It won’t take long. A guy’s got to make a good impression when he’s talking over a business deal.” He emptied the pants pockets, wadding the handkerchief around the bills so the guy couldn’t see the roll. Not that it was anything to bug the eyes out. Around seventy bucks wasn’t any fortune. But this buzzard looked as if he’d roll you for a ten spot. Or even a fiver.

The guy said, “I’ll have to keep Alfie downstairs longer.”

“Not much longer. Shouldn’t take long to press a suit. Sponge and press.” He went over and hung the dark suit on the guy’s big forearm. “You’re picking up some change the management won’t have to know about.” He winked. “Or Alfie?”

“Okay,” the guy said.

Sailor stood there on the ugly, dust-drenched rug, his hat on his head, his shirt tails hanging over his blue silk jockey shorts. Until the guy closed the door. He stood there until he heard the big feet slapping down the stairs. Then he moved fast. Turned the key in the lock and left it there. He took off his hat and sailed it at the bureau. It lit. “Jesus,” he breathed. A locked door, a shower, a can. All his own. Until the suit came back. He was playing in luck. He stripped off his dirty shirt and dirty shorts, wadded them together, took off his shoes and socks. To get clean again, to scrub. No wonder he’d been thinking about the old man and the old lady and him a kid. He hadn’t been this dirty since he was a kid.

He didn’t stop to open his suitcase. He stopped only long enough to grab his gun and he headed for the bath. He parked the gun on the back of the can and he got under the shower, turned it on full force. It hit him like rain in the middle of Chicago summer. Like rain from Heaven. He just stood there for a while soaking it up, the way a tree soaked up the rain.