And The Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day (3)

A/N: Hopefully everyone will find this chapter more eventful. 'Tis a tad longish.

**

Louis places his hand on the neck of the mare and rubs it with his open palm. He can feel the life underneath all that muscle and skin. He can feel the clip of its heart. Everything that Maria has told him about, he can feel just by closing his eyes and holding his breath and resting his hand on the neck of the horse. Here are her clamshell hooves, they scuff the ground. Here are her beanpole legs, they bend with grace and dignity. Here are her beetlewinged eyes, they are wise and rolling. Louis places his hand now on the bridge of her skull and she shies away to smell his hand. Her lips brush all wet and warm against his hand with candiedapple breath.

Buen caballo, Louis says to the owner of the horse, a gray man with clay skin and his hair plastered to his forehead where his hat had been. The man smiles and nods and Louis looks off into distance where the desert flutters like a matador's cape and rubs the horse absently. The morning is washed out and bland with sun and the buildings cast long baking grease shadows all along the ground. There are flies everywhere in the open stable, buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, like when you pinch reeds between your fingers and blow into them.

The Mexican man's peablossom shirt is wet with sweat and he licks his lips.

“You want horse?”

Louis shrugs.

Quizás. Cuánto?

The man looks away for a moment.

Trescientos pesos.

Louis shrugs again. He looks into the horse's wet sugar cube eyes that stare back at him with sapience and says to the Mexican man,

“Let me think about it.”

**

The ground is muddy and brown, like a cross-legged Comanche, and we crouch in the lot on our haunches. Oscar has a smashed pack of Marlboro's in his hands, tapping a cigarette out with his finger. He has his collar turned up and his twine hair curls on his head. He offers a cigarette to me and I take one. My hands are purple from the cold. Blue hair ribbon veins stand out inside them and when I breathe steam rises from my mouth like horsebreath.

Oscar takes a lighter out of his pocket and flicks the wheel. He flicks it again and a flame leaps into the air and he holds his cigarette over it, pinched by his fingers. Eyes glittering like pennies at the bottom of a wishing well, he puts the cigarette between his lips and breathes deeply.

He coughs a little and lets a tadpole of smoke out of his mouth.

He smiles.

“See? Easy as pie.”

I look at the cigarette again and then back up at Oscar's face.

I take the lighter out of his fingers, light the end of the Marlboro and place it between my lips, just like Oscar did. I inhale and warm smoke genie pours down my throat and fills up my lungs. It itches like crazy. It scours my throat and my lungs and steals all of the air out of my chest with greedy, spirit hands.

I cough.

I cough hard and Oscar smiles again.

I can almost feel my face turning green, like Granny Smith apple. But the morning is so cold, and the smoke is so warm and so I say, “It's terrible,” and take another drag.

Oscar does, too.

This one I can keep down better.

Even though he's as old as me, Oscar has this wrinkled, Old Crow Indian face; battered and round. His eyes are brown and when he speaks, he speaks quietly. Speaks like you would to an hobnailed horse put out to pasture. I know that he doesn't have the best home life, but neither do I for that matter. I know he lives in an apartment building downtown, a sad thing made out of red bricks and Chinaman wallpaper: yellow and dry-skinned. At night, I know that the cold steals in and freezes up all his toes into cherry pips and turns his fingers pitchfork prongs; metal and cold.

Oscar lifts up the pack of Marlboro's and slips it into his pocket all smooth and casual and taps the ashes off of the end of his cigarette with a flick of his thumb.

“Stole em right off my dad's dresser. He won't miss em. Smokes about three packs a day anyway, and he'll just think that he's somehow already plowed through another half pack.”

I flick the ashes off of my own cigarette. They drift to the ground like wheat chaff.

“Sure beats sitting in a class all day,” he says.

I shrug and pull my coat closer around myself. “I dunno. If we stay out here much longer, they'll have to defrost us to see if we've still got a pulse.”

Oscar smiles. “Man, you ain't felt nothing yet.”

“We could go to my house. My mom'll be in bed all day and my dad's closing a deal until six.”

“I guess.”

“You got a better idea?”

“Nope.”

I sit back and watch the showercurtain sky and I watch little birds flicker by, disappearing into the clouds like seeds pressed into soil. There is a kind of peace in knowing that you're in the heart of a big city. There is a kind of peace in squatting in a back lot with a cigarette and someone to talk to and feeling a city descend around your shoulders with cold indifference. Muffling your heart. Muffling your breath. Pulling you tighter and tighter into its embrace until you can feel the elevators sighing and the subway system trembling and the tall, sequoia skyscrapers whispering quietly between themselves.

I put my hand on the ground, dry grass bristling against my palm, and feel the heartbeat of Manhattan.

**

It is night.

Louis climbs the corral fence and sneaks in to the stable, pulling the ropeknotted handle of the door toward himself silently. There are harems of petalwinged moths dancing in the air and mesquite rustles like nightgowns in the wind. The air is cold and smooth and and leans on the stable.

Everything nurses sunburns.

Louis steps into the stable. It smells of horses and sweat and dust. In the dim light, the horses are dark and silent, like dusty vehicles in a used car lot. They sway and stir and Louis walks among them in silent boots.

But one by one, the animals wake up, despite his best intentions and their eyes glisten tiredly and their bodies shift around with indignant sleepiness. Their shrubskin is matted with moonlight. Their bodies are chrome and slick and they whinny as he passes. He stops at the final stall, which belongs to the horse the gray Mexican man showed him earlier. He thinks about taking her now, but he knows that neither of them are prepared. Tonight is a rendezvous. A liason.

Her eyes are all silver, like teaspoons, and when he puts his hand on the bridge of her skull again, her hair is stringy and burlap under his fingers. She is quiet and she nudges his hand and Louis's skin crawls with red ants in response; tingling just a little. He feels as if the whole world has hushed up and is watching reverently and the dust is sweet and her breath is hot.

“Are you this friendly to everyone?” he asks at a whisper.

She eats the tips of his fingers with candlestub teeth, her lips soft as peachskin.

“So, hon. You busy tomorrow night? I was thinking we could make some music together. Paint the whole godawful desert red. What do you say? I'll be nice. I swear, hon, I'll be a perfect genn'lman.”

He cocks his neck forward and rubs the horse behind her ears and says, “I know, I know. We ain't barely even met and I'm coming at you full swing. Nah, I completely understand if you wanna pass me up. After all, it's a big pond we live in. Plenty of little guppies got eyes for me and nobody's heart'll be broken. I'm just sayin though that this is a modern world we're livin in and if you pass me by you're passin by progress. You're passin by the future.”

The moon shines through slats in the stable, painting long toadtongued strips of flypaper light, making the dark shine, shine, shine like the cheeks of a black man. And yet the darkness cleans the air, sweeps away all the dustfog that sunlight brings with it. And so the sounds of Louis's voice and the sounds of the horses trickle high and cold and clear, like fresh-made rainwater.

Louis bites his lip and unlatches the stallgate of the mare. The hinges make seagull squeaks as he opens it and steps in with the horse keeping his hand on her shoulder, her belly, her haunches. She sits there passively. Passively as a woman spread-legged and bored. Underneath her skin, the mare's body writhes. Unnoticeable, but endlessly twitching and flowing like grass snakes. She paws the ground nervously as Louis comes closer to her, laying his head against the cradle of her belly and spine.

Rolling her eyes, she moves away slightly from Louis and knocks over a feedcan and a rake, which clatter together. Louis winces. The noise travels through the dead desert air and at the ranch house a dog winds itself up and lets out a series barks.

The barking lasts several minutes, unending, before:

A light pops on at the hacienda.

A screen door slams.

¡Cállate! a voice says to the dog.

Louis crouches up against the wall of the horsestall, his heart thumping like the heel of a hand on a guitar face. He can hear the footsteps of the Mexican on the gravel. He knows that the man is probably carrying a gun and he knows that the man would have no problem mushing up his head with a bullet. Horsethieves are worse than murderers after all. The emptiness of a stall is far worse than the emptiness of a bed or a place at the table.

Louis reaches over to the fallen rake, drags it over, and wraps his hands around its neck.

The horse shifts nervously.

Bobbing laternlight shines through the barn slats, yellow as spoiled milk and Louis hears the man unlatch the door to the stable and slip in. He says, ¿Quién hay?

Louis tightens his grip on the rake and glances through a gap in the wood paneling. He can see the gray Mexican with a shotgun in his hands and suspenders strapped across his naked chest, polished as whalebone in the moonlight and his eyes as dark as blackeyed susans. He trembles as he walks. The horses watch him with mute eyes and the mare tosses her head impatiently.

¿Quién hay?

Louis holds his breath.

The man approaches closer.

Louis can almost hear him breathing; a soft, irregular sound, like roosting pigeons. The air is sweaty. It makes Louis's shirt stick to his back and his hands to turn into bread dough. The air is so heavy, heavy, heavy it lies across his chest and pushes all the air out of his lungs, until they are as flat and limp as bicycle tires.

The man is so close now.

He can smell him.

Cornbread and sex and horsesweat.

He can hear his heartbeat thumping warpath rhythms right behind him.

Louis rises to his feet and swings the rake handle as hard as he can at the Mexican, standing there bewildered and reedy with shivers. The wood meets his skull and his head shoots back and his legs give under him and he stumbles against a neighboring stall. Sweet and sticky, blood is red on his temples. Louis unlatches the stall gate, and comes out the rake handle ready in his hands. The man stumbles to his feet and starts to swing his shotgun around, pinwheel eyes rolling in his skull, but Louis hits him in the jaw with the rake again. The man spits out a couple of chickenscratch teeth and falls again. He grabs for Louis's ankles on the ground, but Louis smashes them with the head of the rake and he can hear them snap like pea pods.

Louis hits him in the back.

And again.

And again until the man stops groaning and moving, stiff and still, with cold, swollen railroad stakes for fingers and a withered up mouth.

Louis sweats.

He throws down the rake and picks up the man's shotgun and leads his horse out of the stall. He is shaking. Every part of him is shaking. And yet he still finds the composure to throw himself like a sack of feed over the back of the horse (who only shifts a little) and climb on top of her. Clutching her mane in his fingers, he kneads her forward with the heels of his boots and rides her out of the barn and into the purple desert.

He rides for two miles full gallop away from the hacienda and the town on the bareback of the horse until he slows, falls off and vomits into the dust, shivering, gasping.