And The Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day (5)

A/N: After chapter six, everything picks up.

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On weekends, Maria takes me up to some stables that my father holds in Glenville. He never goes up there himself, though. He's too busy in his skyscrapers that stretch up to God like ironshelled and glasswindowed towers of Babel. He has become part of his citybuildings, I think. Whenever he is away from them his face is all gray and transparent, like the lacewings of horseflies, and his movements are all stiff and contrived – remote-controlled. He holds the stables for some kind of sentimental purpose. To remind him of the past he has shed and left crinkled and fragile on the ground behind him.

The horses are just things.

He judges his success in life by how many things he has.

We ride a train up to Glenville. The train rocks and shifts around on the rails and when I lean my head up against the window glass and close my eyes, I can feel the pulse of this steel bison, black and lonely. I like the feel of it. It's kind of like when you wrap your arms as far as they'll go around the neck of a horse and lay down against it and let it run, run, run through the wheatgrass. You can feel the raw, red life under it all. Enslaved and warm.

Maria usually sleeps on the trainrides. She leans her head back and the skin of her roostercomb neck hangs corded and her breath rattles, like the dry fingerbones of a shaman. But when she is awake, she tells me stories. They make me laugh, and think, and sleep.

But today her story is subdued and serious and there is something about her voice that is different.

She says to me, “You want to know how I came here? Huh? How I got here, to you? I don't know. I don't care. I need to tell you. I think you are ready. I was a girl once, you know this. I used to live in this great, big house that sat on good grazing land and I lived with horses. There were some people, but mostly horses. I never wore shoes. They made my feet too heavy. My father, he was a big man with big words and big dreams. But he was different than most big men, in that he actually deserved to be big, you know? He worked to be his size. His hands. His hands could fit all the way around my waist and my head and they were rough. Good, working hands. He was more than just a ranch Don, though, he was a great leader, also. His speeches were honey. They attracted people as if they were flies, buzzbuzz, nothing more.”

She looks at me with her thin, shrunken eyes and crosses her hands in front of her.

The hills are milkwhite in the New York fog – breasts.

“Mexico loved him. And he loved Mexico, sometimes more than his family. But that is fine, because we understand the ties men and the land have. We support him as he rises up, up in the government, proud and sturdy. But trouble comes. It always comes, you know this. The government my father worked for is corrupt all around him and he sees that he has been blind to the suffering of the people and now the people come up against him. He is killed. My mother and my sisters and me were forced to leave while my brothers stayed to help. What help? There is no help against such things. We say goodbye to the horses and we come to Texas. There we are treated as if we are diseased. Wormy. There is nothing good about us; we are merely workhorses. And so we work. My sisters fall away, one by one, and Mother dies. I come here. Always moving, moving. I come here to you.”

She looks away and I look at her.

“What happened to your brothers?” I ask.

She shrugs with knobby shoulders that her dress hangs on. “God only knows. Maybe they followed my Father. Maybe they followed us. Maybe they are still there, in Mexico. Who knows? Not me.”

“Do you want to know?”

She continues to look away.

Her lips are bunched up like a handful of gathered wildflowers.

“Yes,” she says.

The rest of the trip is silence and when we reach the stables she watches me in silence, too, staring off into the gray sky as if it was some kind of great, big silent picture spread out before her.

**

The land is a blueprint in the night; crinkled and folded by rough, natural hands. The rain is gone and Louis sits at the base of a deadwood tree with papery foxtail skin. There is a small fire at his feet that makes Bo dance in the night for him, makes her look aboriginal and old, makes her shadow weave on the ground like naked sprites. He watches her. He is captivated by her. There is a song coming from inside her ribcage that makes the ground shake a little, convulse like a wildman.

The fire smears warpaint light on Louis's cheekbones.

He is hungry. He hasn't had anything to eat since the evening before and his stomach contracts and twists and his lips are dry, dry, dry. There is no water anywhere except for the drops clinging to the treelimbs like sweat on the forehead of working men, which he watches. The fire crackles and Louis closes his eyes and pretends that he's in a car and it's raining and the pebblechatter turns the car roof into a drum.

He dozes.

When he wakes up, the embers of the fire cast harvestmoon orange all over Bo. She regards him. The hunger hurts, but he know that people have experienced worse and he studies the desert before falling asleep again.

In his dreams, the children of the Mexican find him and tear out his guts and feed them to Bo.

**

We sit there together on the corner of 72nd and Columbus squatting on the sidewalk with our schoolbags between our legs. The faces of all the people passing by are brown and spongy, like the face of a split apple that's been laying around for a while. They're hunched up in their coats and in their misery, which they keep wrapped tightly around them. Dried and withered, they skitter across the streetcrossings and sidewalks , heads down, mindless as meek, old horses with sapling legs.

Oscar is scared, I can tell. He keeps spitting and clearing his throat and readjusting his bag, where the drugs are. I just smile. I just smile and watch the people and check the time. Finch said four o'clock and it's four thirty now and I'm a little nervous, too, but I guess that I can hide it a bit better. And I think that this is more of a game for me than anything else. For Oscar, this is a stepping stone to the other side.

Again, the sky is tin-colored, and rusty with a few iron clouds, like the big underside of an old fishing boat. It's been a long time since I've seen any blue. I know it's there, though. I know it's hiding there behind all its proper starched dresses. I know that yearns to bust out, but it just can't, it just can't, a trapped bug in a jar. A horse trapped in skin. A child trapped in clothing.

I glance at Oscar.

He spits.

His beetleshelled eyes look at me.

“What?”

“I dunno.”

“Geez, Lou. You're not even sweatin. What if the cops find us, huh?”

“Schoolkids. Nothin but candy and comic books, right?”

He shrugs and looks away, “Right, right.”

“You wanna call it a day?”

“Man, we ain't sold nothin!”

“You think we're any better than traveling salesmen? And they don't sell nothin for days, but they keep on knockin, right?”

Oscar just shakes his head.

He plucks at his shoelace, like a bird plucking at a worm.

A man stands at the cross walk with a white airline vomitsack and a lean, copper cowbell face. His whole body sort of bends into the coat he wears, sickle-shaped. Oscar nudges me.

“Hey! Isn't that the mark, man? White bag, big coat.”

I look a little closer. “Yup. Let's go.”

We get to our feet and walk behind the man. Oscar's orchardladder legs wobble and shake, and he puts on his tough face. We come up beside the man. He doesn't look at us. We don't look at him. He says out of the corner of his mouth, “You got it?”

“Sure.”

“Okay.”

He fumbles in his pocket for something and drops the white paper bag (on accident), like a dead dove, delicate and heavy. I grab it and open it up and Oscar takes a parceled up sack out of his schoolbag. The cash in the white bag is papery and old, like lizardskins and when I reach in the grab it and stuff it in my pocket I can't help smelling it. Weighing it. Let it sift around in my hands like good soil.

Oscar jams a sack into it and hands it to the man.

“Mister, you dropped your bag.”

The man winks and smiles: a strange uprooting of the skin.

“Thanks, kid.”

The crosswalk light turns green and the man crosses and my head spins and Oscar is nudging me and saying, “C'mon, man. C'mon.”

We run for a long time, breathless and laughing, thrilled at how cool we played it, thrilled with the cash I've got in my pocket, and thrilled by the danger. We run into our drygrass lot and we crouch in the corner. Oscar breaks out a pack of cigarettes and I blow furiously at my lavender hands, rubbing them until a little bit of warmth comes back, coloring red like rouged-up whorecheeks. I stick a cigarette between my lips and light it. Oscar asks me to show him the money and I do. We look at there on the ground, strewn and crumpled; a fallen birdsnest.

“Gotta be at least two hundred bucks there, man. That's...Finch gets sixty percent, right? So. We end up with...Geez, I hate math. Do you know?”

“Eighty bucks, I think. Forty each.”

Oscar sits back and runs his hand through his hair.

“That's almost sinful, you know, to be that rich.”

He takes a drag and stares off, his eyes wide and unblinking.

Above us, the clouds still cup the sun with wrinkly old hands, cup it like a big bullfrog caught down by the creekbank, fat and radiant and fleshy.