Young Writers Society

A/N: Those of you who know Spanish are going to have to help me out here as time progresses. There are only three or four words of Spanish in this chapter, but Louis'll be spending a lot of time in Mexico among people who don't know any english at all.

I realize that in the last chapter I didn't introduce the main character's name. I will go back and find some way to fit it in. It is Louis.

**

Louis wakes up with salt-lick lips and the sun turning his face into a mud-and-cucumber mask, burning and peeling it. He blinks and raises his hand to block out some of the light. The whole world is buzzing and awake and the sagebrush he lies beside rustles like lovers in the hay, red-eyed and straw-haired

The warm air feels like breath from cattle nostrils.

Louis throws off his blanket and gets to his feet, every bone in his body feeling unsteady. He spits at the ground and looks up at the sun again.

He is not wearing a shirt and his chest is whittled and brown, like the skin of a barebacked horse. Already, his face is dirty and his hair splinters out from his skull and his eyes squint up into mail slots.

Delicately, he shrugs on a t-shirt, unzips his backpack, and pulls out a half-empty water bottle, a Snickers bar, and his roadmap. The water drizzles down his throat like rain pearling off of slickers and he weighs down the roadmap with his boots, studying it as he eats the candy bar. Fat, ugly grasshoppers flick across the ground like cigarette stubs tossed out of car windows and something about the wind sounds like the radio playing in a convertible skimming down a country road; tinny and watered down. Louis closes his eyes for just a bit and ignores the map and the pinto bean sun and his hotsauce throat and the fact that he only had half a pack of Marlboros in his backpack. He let the whole desert sink through his skin.

Fresh.

Virgin.

There is nothing about this place that knows what a motor sounds like.

Everything is ancient and solemn. Broken and humble.

But it is noble and removed as well. It is as if God had taken a shovel, scooped out this landscape and placed it in a flower pot, turned it into some kind of aging Eden, some kind of matchstick, moth-dust holy place.

Louis takes a deep breath of the air and folds up his map.

**

The window is open and me and Maria sit lean out of it and look down. The ground is so far away, so far away that I feel all dizzy when I look at the sidewalk and the people walking all over it; tin-colored and mechanical, like wind-up mice. I think of how romantic it would be to tip, tip, tip over until your entire body is passed the sill and heading down. The sidewalk croons to us. It is some kind of lover with a guitar beneath our window, strumming ballad love songs. I can hear it, Maria can hear it, but everyone else is oblivious.

Around us there are buildings with harsh and unforgiving faces. They are Chinamen faces. With yellow-brick skin and empty insides. Insides. Me and Maria close our eyes and try to feel each other's insides – heartbeats and emotions as thick and blue as Elvis's hair. Lace curtains puffed up by wind touch our faces, like peddlers shoving their wares – woven rugs and silver jewelry – at tourists, at us.

In the distance, we can hear the saxophone player who plays the blues on Riverside Avenue. He's a stilt fellow. Everything about him is so thin. He's got cinnamon stick arms and prison bar legs and when you put a quarter into his hat sitting there in front of him he lights up like a Havannah cigar.

“Alright, mi chamaco, time for bed,” Maria says, closing the window.

She helps me swing my legs off of the ledge, I walk over to my bed, and slip under the covers. In the half-light, I asked her to tell me a story about her childhood. I ask her to tell me about Old Mexico. She smiles and sits on the side of my bed and tells me a story about a pretty young girl with horse-tail hair and grasshopper legs and a smile that could charm a whole city into sitting quiet and watching her.

She tells me how this girl grew up on a hacienda and how the sky above it was always dry and blue, like worn denim and how horses populated the ranch in unimaginable numbers. They would stand there in the early morning, stand there noble and red, with puffs of steam coming from their nostrils and how their legs were always long and black, like shovel handles. She tells me of their eyes. Their pocketwatch eyes that were always crying. Why they cried, she didn't know. The pretty girl assumed it was because they grieved for their lost freedom. Broken, they grieved for naked moonlight and broadness of the mesa, expansive and stout and dry as the back of a slave momma. They grieved because they no longer slept in the open, with the sky folding around them, but now stood still and quiet in stables.

She tells me of the Don, the little girl's father. She tells me how his hands were strong and big. She tells me how his eyes were always little brushfires and how his broad cactus blossom face could be gentle and fierce.

She tells me how when Mexico fell, so did the hacienda.

She tells me how the Don's eyes extinguished themselves.

She tells me how the tails of all the horses swish-swished for them when they piled into a spit-and-prayers bus, waving goodbye.

Then she stands up and turns the light out. She turns the light out and puts a warm kiss on my forehead and tells me that the story will finish tomorrow.

I don't go to sleep for another hour and a half.

I've got too much desert in my blood to go to sleep.

**

He walks passed the first building in the town as the sun starts setting over the horizon, wounding the land with red boutonnières. The buildings are squatting all along the sides of the road. Old men. Old men with rocking chair bones and desertscrub stubble. There are only a few people outside. Some young children, some men with hard boots and chaps, and one or two women. Everyone else is in their homes.

They regard him with curious eyes.

Louis walks into the hotel and asks for a room. The girl at the counter looks at his American clothes, her eyes lingering especially on the baseball hat he wears tilted back like a ten-gallon Stetson. Her mouth was thin and silent.

“Habitación cuatro,” she says and hands him a room key.

His room smells of cigar smoke and his bed stands there tired and used in the middle of the room. The wall is peeling off its paper clothes, like a skinnydipper, and a ceiling fan churns the air into butter. Louis dumps his backpack on the floor – which creaks, creaks, creaks – and he sits on the edge of the bed with cotton covers stiff with starch and clean. He runs his hands through his hair and lays down, not bothering to take off his boots or his clothes, like some kind of dusty corpse buried in his Sunday best.

Tired, tired. He had walked all day. When he closes his eyes, the noon sun still burns on his eyelids, a dull tortilla face that he can't shake away. He can feel the dust wheedling into his pores. Drydust. Moondust.

Louis takes his radio out of his pocket and turns it on. It only picks up up Mexican channels now. And those are faint and dying too. The sounds are tinned. Fishing worms gathered in old coffee cans by barefoot boys.

Outside, blueness perpetrates.

It sidles down the sidewalk with star-spurred feet.

The wind spooks the sagebrush and it tosses its head on the cracked ground

Louis knows that tonight he's gotta get a horse.

Somehow, somehow.

He's just got to.

**

Their blood is in the streets.

It is in creeks that wet the lips of the ground.

(Benevolent father, we have sinned.)

They die in these streets. They die for small and unimportant things. For a horse. For a child. Their stomachs are swollen. Their stomachs are big empty churches. Their children have skinny little chests with corral ribs that are enunciated by tanned-hide skin. They gather around strangers with sad faces and cupped hands. They are so old. It's like they've been left in the bathwater too long and now they're shriveled up, shriveled up.

Stupid people.

Beautiful people.

(And no one to pray for them.)

Their women are quiet and have smoked skin, jerky skin. Everything about them is rough and tangled. When they speak, you can see that they are missing teeth and that the ones they aren't missing are yellow or brown, like uncooked popcorn kernels. They used to be little girls. Attractive girls maybe, if it wasn't for the prune age in their skin. They used to be fresh and unshucked, but time is rough with its playthings.

Their men are heavy-footed and they have dark, bottle-cap eyes. They are all drunkards. They have hands that are sanded smooth by dry, clotted earth and skinny-necked plows. When they open their mouth to speak their words snap, like belts against the naked backsides of naughty boys, naughty girls. They used to be boys. They used to be robin-breasted and cock-tailed. They used to walk upright in a world as broad-brimmed as a sombrero.

(Mama, mama. It'll come, it'll come.)

Now, all they do is look at the sky.

Look at the salt-flat sky.

Blue.

Cranky.

Won't give up its wet kisses for nobody, nossir!

And so the ground yellows and cracks into callouses on a man's palm. And the men roll cigarettes and the women boil more beans.

(It'll come.)

They keep telling themselves that as they break their necks looking upwards.

(It'll come.)