And The Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day (4)

He leans there up against his car with his chest exposed from under his madras shirt and a cigarette hanging from his lips. The smoke he breathes out is musty and sweet, like the smell of wet leaves and his hair is coiled on top of his flat, black head. When he smiles at us, it's almost as if light leaks out from behind his teeth and his hands are clean and shiny, like the laugh of a baby.

His buddies are in the car, smoking.

Music plays on the radio.

Oscar smokes too, but his smoking is less confident and this man, named Finch, finds the little fishbone cigarette sticking out of Oscar's mouth pretty funny. Oscar tries his best to look tough, but his expression kind of melts into a pitbull face; scrunched and baggy.

Finch turns his lit up smile on me.

I can feel his eyes groping at me, like seaweed wrapped around my legs, and he says,

“Oscar only says high things about you, man. We was down by that shop on 10th the other day and everthing he said was Lou this and Lou that. I always say that ifn you can't get a girl to make you feel good, then get a sucker to be your friend.”

Cars thrum above us on the overpass, like when you blow on the edge of a applejuice jug and it makes that foghorn sound. The faces of Finch's buddies are pretty much covered up by all the smoke in the car and Oscar kicks at the ground with his beat-up sneakers, ignoring what Finch said.

“So whaddya say, Finch? Can't you use us, man?”

“Kid, what do I look like to you? You think I run some kind of orphanage? Godssakes, I start bringing in a couple urchins and then the whole freakin city is gonna give up it's young and I'm gonna be swimmin in your diapers.”

“I can pick a lock.”

“Bet you can.”

“I can fight.”

“Sure.”

“Man, you want proof?”

“Kid, you're twelve.”

“Thirteen.”

“Thirteen. How the hell am I gonna use a thirteen year old, man?”

I say, “Your boys are always getting busted for dealing drugs, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Problem is, they look like dealers. They stand there with their big coats on the sidewalk and they attract cops like flies.”

I wait for my words to sink in, but Finch's gaunt, waspnest face is blank.

“So?”

Oscar takes over. “So we don't look like pushers, man. We these baby faced schoolkids. We got nothin but candy and comic books in our pockets.”

Finch folds his arms across his chest and looks away. I can see his brain churning inside his skull like a laundromat washing machine, turning our words over and over, examining them, holding them up to the light. His throat bobs and he takes his cigarette out of his mouth.

Smoke issues from his nostrils.

“Okay. Sure. You've got a point. Man, I've been needin some fresh blood anyway. When do you wanna hit the streets?”

Oscar looks at me. His face is triumphant.

“Tomorrow,” he says.

Finch sticks out his rooster-talon hand and winks and we shake it.

He turns wordlessly and opens the door to the car, the engine clears its throat, and he drives away. When Finch's car has disappeared behind the corner, Oscar pumps his arm and spins around. I smile and keep my hands in my pockets. I can see Oscar's been sweating. His face his gray and shiny, like dolphinskin.

“Told you, man!” He says slinging his arm around my shoulder. “Didn't I tell you? Told you we'd spring a job. Told you Finch would be cool with it.”

We start walking.

“Finch is a deadbeat,” I say. “He's a loser.”

Oscar shrugs. “Maybe. But this is only the beginning, right? There'll be plenty of other losers. Better losers.”

I nod.

I sort of don't like the jump we've made. It's like we're in a Wright Brother's airplane – chuttermouthed and twig-ribbed – coughing our baby burp engine across an ocean. We've got flimsy wings and our dreams our made out of Tinker Toys. And we know that the part where we crash is coming, but all we care about is how blue the sky is up here past those shaving cream clouds and it's blinding. Blinding. All this sky leaks into our skin and dyes us whaleblue. Our eyes are so up, up, up. Our feet: they've got nothing underneath them. We've got candlewax wings and we know where the sun is and where the water is but we know nothing else. Nothing else.

I can feel our engines stalling already.

But Oscar's face is so red. Red from the excitement and the cold and from the way the wind slaps us. And I can't but help be infected with a little bit of his enthusiasm. I can't but help feel like we got bedsprings in our heels and our chests are filled with helium.

**

The day is hushed.

Louis rides on the back of the stolen mare smoking his last cigarette. The air smells of rain and the horizon has turned as black as axle grease and the chaparral is unshaven. Around him, the ground rises up naked and fleshy, like lovers in bed.

Greasy.

Louis feels greasy with the shotgun in his hand.

He feels as if he hasn't bathed in days and he feels like all his clothes are sticking to him and he his skin feels like some kind of loose raincoat around him. His birchbark calves are chaffed and rough and peeling because he's been riding the horse bareback and his stomach is all small. Shriveled up to the size of a walnut. And his lips. They are dry and cracked, like the heels of old leather shoes, duct-taped together so that your toes don't show. His bent nail back bends over the body of the horse.

He thinks about the Mexican man.

He thinks about his face.

He thinks about the way he folds underneath the handle of the rake.

He thinks about the stillness of his chest.

His bed was still warm. His wife was tucked there under the covers with him and he had cold feet walking down the hall and stepping into his boots. His children were asleep and the smell of their sweet stablebreath filled the house. Now he is cold. Now he lies in the dust all still and silent and the morning will touch his face and sunlight will grow across his features like peatmoss.

Louis flicks his cigarette onto the ground.

They will come after him.

And if they catch him he will hang from the only tree in the town, from its sturdiest branch, weighing it down like an abundance of fruit.

“What else could I do, huh?” he says.

His words are dull and muted in the air, shriveled like used candlewicks. The horse doesn't pay them any mind, letting them slide off her head and onto the ground. Louis is struck by how alone he is out here. He is struck by the delicacy and resilience of all this ghosttown silence. Out here, where there were no taxis or horns or smog or the frenzied, clanking, whirring robotics of a city prodded into a frenzy, like a nest of honeybees. Here, the ground is solemn, the sky is watchful. It is rough and old and untamed, with buzzard skin and harmonica sighs.

Louis and his horse pass through the silence as strangers.

He is conscious of his breathing.

The sound of the horse shoes on the deadbeat, chapped ground.

“I mean, he came after me, right? He had a shotgun, for godssakes! If I didn't hit him, he woulda killed me. Self-defense. Simple. I got a little carried away, sure, but it happens, right? Blood is hot. I couldn't help it... He had a shotgun, you know. Pointing right at me. Right at my head and if I hadn't done something he would have hauled off and put a couple new holes in my...”

He spit and looks off.

He was reaching for something, like when you're on a swing-set, being pushed higher, higher until your dewdrop toes tickle the bluebell bottom of the sky. Until you stretch so far with your hands wrapped tight around the ironlinks. The horse walks deafly. Louis shakes his head.

“Aww hell. What does it matter, huh? Just another body. World's full of em...Geez, you're a talker, hon. What am I gonna call you, huh? You just walk here. You don't care about nobody. Don't care about me, you don't care about your Mexican lying back there. You're a free agent. Wherever the wind blows, right?”

Cottonseed flecks of rain dripdripdrip on Louis bare arms.

“So you gotta have a free kind of name, right? Like you just don't care. Knew a horse named Applejacks once. You like that? No? Okay. How about something short and sweet...like Bo? Yeah? Yeah, I kinda like it, too. Don't care about nothin. Nothin at all. Geez, we gotta find someplace to stop and get outta this rain, Bo. Got any ideas?”

As the rain falls, it brightens all the breathless desert colors.

The desert opens its toothless, gummy mouth to swallow all the rain.