“Sitting,” he said.
“Until I stand up,” said John. “There’s hot stuff inside.”
Gino was at the sink, ladling the cereal into bowls. They’d brought powdered milk and sugar, and there were spoons on the drain board. Frank was tidying his sleeping bag in a corner, and Carlos saw the two others, lined up side by side on the bed’s springs like body bags for skeletal remains.
“You found the toilet?”
“The shit house? Yeah. Such as it is. It’s tilted,” Gino said.
“Most everything is,” said Carlos, accepting the bowl Gino handed him.
When he reached the porch again, the chair was empty, and John was standing beside Frank at the railing. Both were rolling their shoulders, extending their arms and legs in odd gestures, as if ordering their bones again in their skins.
“We were just saying about the houses,” Larry spoke from his place at the cauldron.
There had been no buildings at all on the few-mile trek from the main road to the house, not when John had been here with Chepa, but they had passed many on their way out. They’d taken a bus from Tampico, then had managed to hook a ride in the bed of an old half-ton, a farmer returning from market.
“But the thing was, they were ruins. They’d been built after I left here, then had gone through a lifetime.”
“History,” Frank said. “Something else when it becomes real.”
“As with the bed,” John said. “It was very strange to be sleeping there again.”
“Especially with him.” It was Gino. He’d come out on the porch to join them, and Larry grinned at the cauldron’s side when he heard him speak.
The sun rose over the house and lit up the foothills, low scrub and rock of various colors, and even the sand was various, darkly coarse in shadows the rock cast, subtle striations of color in the alluvial spills. There were flowers here and there, delicate desert bloom in reds and yellows, and a few patches of moss where rock under the surface held moisture.
John was speaking about the landing field, the bed, and the outhouse they could see from the porch off to the left near the ruined chicken coop, all parts of a story they had heard before, even bits of it remembered hazily in that past delirium by Carlos. But they were there now, and things were real and without anchor, and needed to be gathered again into a history. The oak tree stood at the edge of the yard and the story, massive and unconcerned. It seemed the machine of time, a perpetual calendar. It had been a sapling, and John spoke of its planting, and of Joaquín again, and the blood and the bullet holes in the house floor and the carvings of the names of revolutionaries in the walls. They’d made no plans for leaving, not just yet, and Gino shushed Frank when he wondered about things at the Manor.
They had turned toward each other, John in his chair again, Gino perched on the steps, Larry and Frank leaning against the porch rail, and were listening to Carlos tell bits of the tale explaining his arrival, mentioning Strickland and his manuscripts and death, Peter in his coma, his own days as a child in Tampico and later near the border. Then they heard Gino, a quick sucking of air whistling in his tracheotomy tube, and when they turned to him, he was pointing, a finger near his chin, and they all followed his gesture to the brink of the foothills just beyond the shadows cast by the oak’s branches and saw the man and the animals.
He sat the horse so comfortably in stillness, body slightly slouched and wrists crossed on the horn, that it seemed he might have been there all along and they’d not noticed him, but for the movements in the string of donkeys and the other horses, saddled and bridled, as they turned their lowered heads, pulling grass from the spare tufts, and lifted them to quietly blow and scent from time to time. He wore a hat, a sombrero with a brief brim, and most of his face was lost in shadow under it, but they could see his broad, flat nose, the slabs of his cheeks and his thick neck above the collar of his heavy cotton shirt, one stitched in rectangles in various patterns, the colors muted in reds and greens. The shirt matched his pants, in color and material, though the latter featured broad horizontal stripes of color, and his shoes at the ends of his short, thick legs were homespun too, something made of a dusty brown leather, loose-looking and comfortable, like sturdy slippers where they hung free of his stirrups. His horse’s head lurched up from the ground, catching something, and they saw his hand slip from the horn, a finger trace a vein in the animal’s shoulder where the saddle ended, and the horse quieted and went back to its cropping. There were five other horses, and three donkeys, their wooden racks loaded with blankets and cloth-wrapped bundles, and clay vessels were tethered to the wood with leather thongs.
Carlos pushed up from the porch floor, where he’d been sitting to the side of John’s wheelchair, leaning against the house, and went down the steps and across the yard and under the shadows of the tree’s branches at their edges. He reached the horse and the man perched upon it, and they saw the man’s face, his broad forehead and the shadows of his dark eyes, as he tilted his hat back and looked down at Carlos and spoke to him. They spoke for a while, and the horses and the donkeys were constant in their cropping, their heads moving aimlessly in infinite patience, as if they had all the time in the world. Then Carlos had turned and was heading back across the yard toward them, and in moments he was climbing the porch steps, and then he was speaking.
“I think he says if we want to know about ownership, or about the oil, we might want to come with him.”
Gino was sitting at the side of the porch steps, much as he’d sat at the window in the Manor, watching him, his back to them.
“What oil?” he said, his voice muffled in his throat. “Does he speak English?”
“No,” Carlos said. “And very little Spanish either. He says, under the tree, on the far side.”
Gino climbed up in his place, pulling himself by the railing, then limped down to the ground and started across the yard, his legs stiff, tugging and adjusting his clothing as he went. They saw the man in the saddle beyond him, maybe watching him, but they couldn’t tell.
“This is not in the plan,” Larry said, and Frank laughed, and John took a cigarette from his pack and tapped it against his can and lit it.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Well, I do,” Frank said. “We don’t have one. But we didn’t come this far to do nothing. I didn’t. I feel pretty good this morning.”
“Shit,” Larry said. “So do I.”
“I think he says it’s a way. Two days, maybe three,” Carlos said.
“I don’t feel too bad either,” John said. “I think I can walk a bit. Maybe even ride.” Sparks fell to the blanket covering his knees, and he brushed them away absently.
They were sure about Gino and none of them needed to speak of him. But they were lying to one another, and Carlos could see that in the way they tested their bodies, then turned away from that, as they spoke. Pretty good meant waking alive once again each morning, not ready to ride out on horses into the wilderness. But they were watching the horses and the donkeys and the man, and Carlos saw Frank tug at the brim of his Stetson, much like a cowboy might on the plains watching cattle on a windy day. He saw John look over at Larry, who winked at him like a boy, then made a muscle in his thin biceps and pointed to it with a finger. His cap had slipped to a rakish angle, and his baggy, pajamalike pants were crossed at the ankles, seductively. He’d turned to face them, and was leaning against the porch railing, smiling, and John laughed and puffed at his cigarette. Then Gino was climbing the porch steps, his body loosened and almost supple again after his short walk. He lifted his black palm and showed it to them, the oil running in a line over his wrist and down his arm.