When he got back to his hut, my father found that the place had been ransacked. He suspected Gabriel’s wife, but couldn’t prove a thing. The rucksack, a few clothes, and the Foxford blankets were all missing. He felt it lucky that he always kept his cameras and money with him — but there was a portent in the robbery. Gabriel walked out of town with him, and a few miles beyond — a big sacrifice for a man with an epileptic tenor in his legs — offering my father the shell of a landcrab as a memento. The crab had slithered up and died on Gabriel’s porch. My father hung the shell from his new rucksack and continued north, along the seaboard, towns thinning out, the Sierra Madres looming.
At night the old man slept with his equipment in much the same way that he might have slept with a woman, coveting his cameras, everything curled in around him, the film in a special bag, even the tripod ensconced at his feet, a little piece of string tied around it and hooked to a big toe. He still had enough money left to go where he wanted, but he kept it tucked in his waistband in case of emergency. He moved inland, took a job painting fences for a rich rancher in the grasslands, sleeping in a horse barn with ten vaqueros. The other men played poker at night. Eight long months, keeping to himself, sulking around the corral, making enough to move along once more. Working on the fences, hammering a tamping bar into the ground, he often thought of the Mexican soldier’s sister. The photo had burned itself like magnesium into his mind. Every now and then he woke up and saw two dreamlike fingers beckoning him. He would go and find the girl. He wandered all the way north, towards the Texas border, hitching occasional lifts across the mountains from small grey trucks. Sometimes men told him about a massive war that had erupted on the other side of the world, rumours of skinny women walking barefoot into gas chambers, rows and rows of them pale as Easter lilies, small mines bobbing on the Pacific, an eruption of barbed wire in a halo around Europe — but all of that was an eternity away, he couldn’t fathom how men could continue their lust for dying after the agonies of Spain. He was treading the middle line between drifter and coward, I suppose. He could have gone to Europe to photograph or fight, but instead he continued his peregrinations, heading westward, away from the smell of the sea, wind in the vast emptiness, all the way through the mountains, across Coahuila, to the eastern side of the Chihuahuan desert.
He improvised a white shirt hung on a branch to keep the heat from beating down on him, looking as if he were surrendering to the land, white sleeves fluttering amid lecheguilla plants and sagebrush and miles of mesquite, kicking his way along endless arroyos, saluting the footprints of grasshopper rats and desert foxes. Nobody lived in that vast red country. Sunsets fell through the western sky, the colour of blood through a fistful of water. Grass grew through the skulls of dead animals, rattlesnakes lay coiled under rocks. He taught himself survival on those long walks — learned to listen for the rumble in the mountains that suggested a flash flood, figured out how to set a trap for a small animal for dinner, caught lizards between his fingers, built teepee fires with dead mesquite. In the morning he rose early and sucked on pebbles to extract whatever dew or moisture had come down the night before. Sometimes he could whisk the dew off blades of long desert grass with his fingers. If things got bad he sliced open a cactus with his knife and tried to suck out its residual moisture. During the hottest time of the day he rested and made water for himself. He would dig a small hole in the ground, piss into it, place a can in the hole and cover it with a piece of plastic. He weighted the plastic in the middle with a small stone, and left it for the sun to evaporate the moisture, which would gather, then drop down, slowly, drip by drip, into the can.
He was intoxicated by it all, this drinking of himself, this wandering, the beard that began to crawl on his cheeks. At night in the desert it got viciously cold, and he hid himself behind rocks or in natural shelters, lit small fires, sometimes walked a little in the night, watching Polaris, the polestar, and flapping his arms to stave off the cold. He spent a week near a streambed, straining water through his handkerchief, watching the rhythms of the country around him, rimrock, valleys, fossils. Once a wolf padded across his path, stopped and stared at him, cocked its head and trotted away.
In the high desert country he eventually found himself in a town three days walk from the border. Low houses were caressed by big swells of dust that billowed through narrow twisting streets. Cottonwoods and tamarisks ranged along the riverfront, a feeder off the Rio Grande. Up from the trees the town gathered along dry brown roads, into a plaza, then out again. A couple of large houses lined the outer streets, but the rest were mostly adobe shacks, interrupted by a Catholic church, shops, a couple of bars, and a town hall. At the edge of the town barefoot kids threw pebbles around him, in a large circle. He ended up resting against a low fence, smoking a cigarette, hat down over his eyes, the sun sluicing its way through the sky, when he saw a young girl gandering around at the back of an old house, followed by a bouquet of older boys. She looked nothing like the soldier’s sister. Her hair was cropped short and a small scar lay under her eye from a fight. She had bruises and cuts on her legs, a linen skirt that was hitched up high above her knees, a length of horse halter used as a belt, tied with an expert sailor’s knot.
She pursed her lips provocatively for his camera, her blouse open flirtatiously, her head thrown sideways like a film actress. Her mother screamed at him from the porch of her house, where she stood in the shadows, skinning a rabbit.
‘Don’t you ever set your eyes on my daughter again, understand?’ she said in Spanish.
The knife went skillfully from the neck of the rabbit all the way down to the crotch, and she hung the carcass upside-down on a clothesline. He nodded, stuck his hat on his head and walked on, having a shave in a silty irrigation ditch. Next morning, he beckoned the girl as she came outside. She moved for his camera and put her arms behind her head, unashamed by the beginnings of armpit hair.
My father pitched camp near the irrigation ditch. Later that week the young girl invented some fabulous lie about how my father was related to John Riley, an Irishman who had commanded the San Patricio Battalion in the Mexican War. My father was hailed as an incarnate revolutionary, though he had never heard of Riley before. He put a red necktie over a white t-shirt to go to the house. The girl’s mother wore a fresh apron and greeted him at the door, wiping flour off her hands, covering her chest with a forearm, waving him in with a sweep of the other hand. My old man was allowed to sit near the head of the table, a newly embroidered serviette folded at his place setting. Laughter rang out around the small adobe house when a cooked rabbit was laid in the centre of the table and the mother stuck a knife into its belly, where it vibrated for a moment. Fresh maize tortillas were laid out in front of him, with large amounts of beans. Drink was slurped from the necks of dark earthenware jars. Songs were swapped and more lies told. My father assured the mother, in his broken Spanish, that Riley had been born in his own household in Ireland, generations ago, the birth enabled by some enigmatic great-grandmother who plucked magic potions from flowers, the birth made fluid by pulp from dandelions.
He was allowed to stay in a small shed near the house, watching the stars through a hole the shape of an upside-down apple in the roof. He always remembered that the light from the rising moon first appeared in the bottom stem, then gradually filled the rest out, as if the hole were being peeled as it gathered light. He had a single wooden desk and a mattress stuffed with rabbit skins. But he still went walking in the desert. One week he wandered north and across the river to Texas to search for film — a long journey to Fort Stockton, walking again, hitching lifts. When he got back, the young girl stood flagrantly in front of his camera, thick red lips, jutting cheekbones, small snub of a nose, an array of colourful clothes drawn around her.