He boarded the horse at a stable out bevond the barrios south of the railtracks and told the patrón to be wary of the horse as he was at best half broke and the man nodded and called to the boy but John Grady could tell he had his own ideas about horses and would come to his own conclusions. He lugged the saddle into the saddleroom and hung it up and the boy locked the door behind him and he walked back out to the office.
He offered to pay in advance but the proprietor dismissed him with a small wave of the hand. He walked out into the sun and down the street where he caught the bus back to town.
He bought a small awol bag in a store and he bought two new shirts and a new pair of boots and he walked down to the train station and bought his ticket and went to a cafe and ate. He walked around to break in the boots and then went back to the hotel. He rolled the pistol and knife and his old clothes up in the bedroll and had the clerk put the bedroll in the storage room and he told the clerk to wake him at six in the morning and then went up to bed. It was hardly even dark.
It was cool and gray when he left the hotel in the morning and by the time he got settled into the coach there were spits of rain breaking on the glass. A young boy and his sister sat in the seat opposite and after the train pulled out the boy asked him where he was from and where he was going. They didnt seem surprised to hear he was from Texas. When the porter came through calling breakfast he invited them to eat with him but the boy looked embarrassed and would not. He was embarrassed himself. He sat in the diner and ate a big plate of huevos rancheros and drank coffee and watched the gray fields pass beyond the wet glass and in his new boots and shirt he began to feel better than he'd felt in a long time and the weight on his heart had begun to lift and he repeated what his father had once told him, that scared money cant win and a worried man cant love. The train passed through a dreadful plain grown solely with cholla and entered a vast forest of china palm. He opened the pack of cigarettes he'd bought at the station kiosk and lit one and laid the pack on the tablecloth and blew smoke at the glass and at the country passing in the rain.
The train pulled into Zacatecas in the late afternoon. He walked out of the station and up the street through the high portales of the old stone aqueduct and down into the town. The rain had followed them down from the north and the narrow stone streets were wet and the shops were closed. He walked up Hidalgo past the cathedral to the Plaza de Armas and checked into the Reina Cristina Hotel. It was an old colonial hotel and it was quiet and cool and the stones of the lobby floor were dark and polished and there was a macaw in a cage watching the people go in and out. In the diningroom adjoining the lobby there were people still at lunch. He got his key and went up, a porter carrying his small bag. The room was large and high ceilinged and there was a chenille cover on the bed and a cutglass decanter of water on the table. The porter swept open the window drapes and went into the bathroom to see that all was in order. John Grady leaned on the window balustrade. In the courtyard below an old man knelt among pots of red and white geraniums, singing softly a single verse from an old corrido as he tended the flowers.
He tipped the porter and put his hat on the bureau and shut the door. He stretched out on the bed and looked up at the carved vigas of the ceiling. Then he got up and got his hat and went down to the diningroom to get a sandwich.
He walked through the narrow twisting streets of the town with its ancient buildings and small sequestered plazas. The people seemed dressed with a certain elegance. It had stopped raining and the air was fresh. Shops had begun to open. He sat on a bench in the plaza and had his boots shined and he looked in the shopwindows trying to find something for her. He finally bought a very plain silver necklace and paid the woman what she asked and the woman tied it in a paper with a ribbon and he put it in the pocket of his shirt and went back to the hotel.
The train from San Luis Potosí and Mexico was due in at eight oclock. He was at the station at seven-thirty. It was almost nine when it arrived. He waited on the platform among others and watched the passengers step down. When she appeared on the steps he almost didnt recognize her. She was wearing a blue dress with a skirt almost to her ankles and a blue hat with a wide brim and she did not look like a schoolgirl either to him or to the other men on the platform. She carried a small leather suitcase and the porter took it from her as she stepped down and then handed it back to her and touched his cap. When she turned and looked at him where he was standing he realized she had seen him from the window of the coach. As she walked toward him her beauty seemed to him a thing altogether improbable. A presence unaccountable in this place or in any place at all. She came toward him and she smiled at him sadly and she touched her fingers to the scar on his cheek and leaned and kissed it and he kissed her and took the suitcase from her.
You are so thin, she said. He looked into those blue eves like a man seeking some vision of the increate future of the universe. He'd hardly breath to speak at all and he told her that she was very beautiful and she smiled and in her eves was the sadness he'd first seen the night she came to his.room and he knew that while he was contained in that sadness he was not the whole of it.
Are you all right? she said.
Yes. I'm all right.
And Lacey?
He's all right. He's gone home.
They walked out through the small terminal and she took his arm.
I'll get a cab, he said.
Let's walk.
All right.
The streets were filled with people and in the Plaza de Armas there were carpenters nailing up the scaffolding for a crepecovered podium before the Governor's Palace where in two days' time orators would speak on the occasion of Independence Day. He took her hand and they crossed the street to the hotel. He tried to read her heart in her handclasp but he knew nothing.
They ate dinner in the hotel diningroom. He'd never been in a public place with her and he was not prepared for the open glances from older men at nearby tables nor for the grace with which she accepted them. He'd bought a pack of american cigarettes at the desk and when the waiter brought the coffee he lit one and placed it in the ashtray and said that he had to tell her what had happened.
He told her about Blevins and about the prisión Castelar and he told her about what happened to Rawlins and finally he told her about the cuchillero who had fallen dead in his arms with his knife broken off in his heart. He told her everything. Then they sat in silence. When she looked up she was crying.
Tell me, he said.
I cant.
Tell me.
How do I know who you are? Do I know what sort of man you are? What sort my father is? Do you drink whiskey? Do you go with whores? Does he? What are men?
I told you things I've never told anybody. I told you all there was to tell.
What good is it? What good?
I dont know. I guess I just believe in it.
They sat for a long time. Finally she looked up at him. I told him that we were lovers, she said.
The chill that went through him was so cold. The room so quiet. She'd hardly more than whispered yet he felt the silence all around him and he could scarcely look. When he spoke his voice was lost.
Why?
Because she threatened to tell him. My aunt. She told me I must stop seeing you or she would tell him.
She wouldnt have.
No. I dont know. I couldnt stand for her to have that power. I told him myself.
Why?
I dont know. I dont know.
Is it true? You told him?
Yes. It's true.
He leaned back. He put both hands to his face. He looked at her again.
How did she find out?
I dont know. Different things. Estéban perhaps. She heard me leave the house. Heard me return.
You didnt deny it.