* * *
It took the rest of the morning and a good part of the early afternoon to get ready. Carlos insisted they eat lunch, and Larry wanted a bath, and the others thought that a good idea too, and Gino and Frank got fires going under the cauldrons, and Carlos and the man who’d come down out of the mountains worked at the pump and carried buckets. He was not really a man, but a boy of no more than seventeen, or eighteen, Carlos thought, but he couldn’t find words to ask the question. He was respectful of the men, treating them as equals, but attentive to their ages and infirmities. He carried the buckets to the cauldrons’ edges, but handed them over to be poured in, and he watched and didn’t help as Gino crawled under the house to hide away the bundles of gear they’d not be taking with them. They laid out efficient clothing, and Larry traded his cap for a water-shaped straw cowboy hat, fine and tightly woven, that the boy produced from a bundle on one of the donkeys. He was pure Indian, Carlos thought, and felt strangely comfortable in the presence of his stolid demeanor. Their eyes met from time to time, without expression, enigmatic to Carlos, but soothing. Frank helped John into a cauldron, then climbed into one himself. Larry sank in the other, his head resting in steam against the rim. Gino waited his turn, and Carlos and the boy too, after hand gestures and urging, took theirs. The old men watched the bodies of the younger men as they climbed in, then turned away from that useless yearning.
By three they were in their saddles and headed up into the foothills. The young man, his name sounded like Alma, was at the head, and Carlos brought up the rear, the donkeys tethered behind him, their line tied to his horn. It pressed against his leg when the donkeys tarried, but tugging it was familiar, some vaguely remembered gesture. He’d ridden when he was young, with his father. When he looked back, he could see John’s wheelchair strapped to a wooden frame. Larry road in front of him in his new cowboy hat, then Frank and John. Gino was lost to sight from time to time, but his broad sombrero marked him, where he bounced along behind Alma, and they’d barely climbed the initial incline and started up the next, when they heard him call out. “Are we almost there yet?” And Carlos heard John laugh up ahead, and saw him cast away the dead butt of his cigarette. The men had put folded blankets over their saddles, protection for their bony asses. Still Carlos saw their hips shift, their free hands working at their thighs, and saw Alma turn and look back when the horses broke into jarring trots, somehow knowing that, then slowing their procession down to a comfortable walk again.
The ground was desert sand, rocks and shifted slabs of shale, and they meandered, no pathway at all, and after each incline they reached a stretch of level ground, but with another incline just past that to negotiate, and they couldn’t see beyond it until they had climbed it and were confronted with another. Then they came to a rise that was a cliff’s face, an escarpment running up into the sky for a good hundred feet. They saw clouds above it and birds floating under them that may have been vultures or hawks, and Alma turned in his saddle and gestured to the right, and they headed along the escarpment, under its cool shadow, until they reached an arroyo that turned as they ascended, the horses slipping and kicking for purchase in loose shale, until the sun was blocked by a cliff face on their right as well, the air cooler, still, but growing bone-wearying.
Carlos saw John struggle to get at the blanket tied to the saddle behind him. He managed to free it. Then it was over his shoulders, his hat brim touching it, and he looked like an old Indian. They came to a turning, and light broke out again ahead, the sun shimmering in blown sand at a distance above the escarpment’s lip, a dust devil in sun, as if an animate figure standing in the air, and nothing beyond it that they could see, until they got beyond it, pressing handkerchiefs and hats into their faces against the blown grit, and their procession had paused and turned and they looked back over the plains of the state of Tamaulipas, and could see the city of Tampico, parts of it between clouds that were now under them, and beyond it the Gulf of Mexico in the far distance. They heard a slap of leather, and Alma turned them, and they saw what lay before them.
They were at the edge of a high plateau, the ground very much the same as what they had, in the last hours, passed over, stone, sand and shale, tufts of rough grass and low cactus poking up in places. The plateau seemed perfectly flat to the left and right, and ahead of them it was flat too, extending out for what seemed miles and only ending in the far distance where foothills began again, and above these foothills mountains rose, jagged and colorless, disappearing in mist and coming dusk at their upper reaches. They saw something in the distance, on the rough plain between themselves and the mountains, animals possibly, moving from left to right, but they were no more than tiny dots, blinking through cones of sand stirred up by capricious wind gusts.
“Good Christ,” Frank said. “How far do you think that is?”
“I don’t know, but we won’t get there tonight,” Carlos answered.
They made camp in the middle of the plain. It could have been anywhere on the plain. It was just rock and cactus and flatness, and the wind rose and began to blow constantly as the sun sank. Alma circled the animals, their heads facing into the circle, muzzles touching and brushing against each other, their lids half closed, approaching sleep already, and staked them there. Then, while the men sat slumped in the sand and Carlos worked to unhitch needed belongings, he went to the water and feed that was a donkey’s burden and removed pottery vessels from the wooden rack there and went back and fed and watered them. Then he stepped away into the growing darkness surrounding their campsite, and in a few minutes came back, arms loaded with sticks and bleached branches that he had found somewhere. Then he got to work on the fire.
It was later. The fire had flamed high into the night at first, but then had settled into a bright, hot glow that was circumscribed, like a fire in a hearth, bright enough to bathe their faces where they sat in a circle facing in at the fire and across it at each other. Alma had set a stone vessel in the embers, and in minutes there was steam rising from it. It was a kind of stew, delicious and warm in their bellies, spicy and sweet, and they ate heartily. They’d cast away stones and dug the trenches in sand in the way Alma had demonstrated. They’d lain in their sleeping bags in them, to test them, finding them comfortable and deep enough to break the wind. They were behind them, still in the fire’s light, and they each knew they’d just have to roll over and crawl in, not much effort and unexpected pain.
“This is some fucking thing,” Gino said, smiling at Alma, who sat beside Carlos beyond the embers. Alma smiled back, as if he understood.
“Does he say we’ll get there tomorrow?” Larry asked.
Carlos shook his head. “I don’t know. I can’t quite get that out of him.”
A breeze blew at the blanket at John’s shoulder, and Frank reached over and pulled it and tucked it under his arm. John was smoking again, and he passed the pack and saw Alma tear the filter away before lighting up, using a stick with a glowing tip.
“Should we talk?” Gino said.
“About what?” Frank said. “Our fucking aching bones?”
“Could be it’s a good hurt,” John said. “Like work? Remember that?”
“I don’t know,” Larry said. “But it could be a comfort, to think of it that way, I mean.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Frank said.
Carlos was watching them, in their hats and blankets in the fire’s glow. The light from the fire bathed their cheeks and brows, and shadows cast by their noses caused angular planes, reconstructing their features. Heads turned and mouths opened on dark holes, and their hair was invisible in darkness above their bone-hard and receding brows. Calaveras, he thought. They’re even dressed for some historical occasion. But they were not that. In the firelight, in expression, they were animate and particular. Only when they were poised and listening, or falling asleep with their eyes open, as was Gino now, did they seem part of that other life.