All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel (22 page)

“You never could rope worth a shit,” Uncle L said. “You couldn’t rope a goddamn stump when you was twenty years old.”

“I would not rope a sick goat, that is for sure,” Lorenzo said. “I would have roped a pig, if I had been there.”

He was very grumpy. I could smell some bread, baking in two big Dutch ovens. A pot of frijoles and peppers was
already bubbling over the fire. A clothesline strung with jerky stretched from the windmill to the house.

“This goat will probably kill us all! Wipe us out!” Lorenzo yelled. Uncle L ignored him. Lorenzo spitted the goat and soon had it cooking. The three Mexicans slunk around the corner of the house and went to their camp, which was in Uncle L’s extensive junkyard. The junkyard consisted of every machine that Uncle L had ever owned. There were twenty or thirty cars, two broken-down bulldozers, several tractors, a hay baler, a combine, and an old cattle truck. The vaqueros lived in the cattle truck.

When the goat was cooked we ate. I had brought a case of Dr. Peppers with me, as protection against the water on the ranch. I drank three of them with lunch. Lorenzo’s frijoles were incredibly peppery. I gave Uncle L a Dr. Pepper and he took one sip and poured the rest on an anthill. In the distance, toward Mexico, we could see Uncle L’s camel herd grazing. He had about forty. He hated cattle and wouldn’t have them on his ranch. Besides camels, he kept goats, buffalo, and antelope. He had tried at various times to raise llamas, guanacos, javelinas, and ostriches, but none of those animals had cared for The Hacienda of the Bitter Waters. They had all promptly disappeared. Uncle L was particularly bitter about the ostriches, and referred to them again as we were eating.

“Always wanted an ostrich ranch,” he said, gnawing on the shank of the goat. Might get me in a few cassowaries. They ain’t as fast as ostriches. Been trying to get a couple of giraffe, too. Always wanted a few giraffe.”

“They will just run away, if you get them,” Lorenzo said. “All the good animals run away, when they come here. Only stupid animals and crazy people live on this ranch.”

While we were eating a fight broke out in the camp of the vaqueros. The junkyard began just beyond the windmill,
so we got to see it all. The vaquero in the yellow chaps wrenched the hood off an old blue Plymouth and threw it at his companions. It hit the man who had been kicked down by the camel—he had not been having much of a day. He scrambled up and he and his ally took possession of the hood. They refused to leave the field, and actually there was no need for them to. The vaquero in the yellow chaps had lost interest in them. His passion was up, again. His companions screeched at him in Spanish, but he paid them no mind. He unscrewed the gas cap from an old black pickup, dropped his pants again, and began to fuck the gas hole. Old Lorenzo thought it was a hilarious business. He doubled up with laughter. Doubled up, he was only about two feet tall. The other vaqueros were outraged, at seeing a pickup fucked. To them it was unpardonable license. They dropped the blue hood and began to throw handfuls of sand at the vaquero. He continued to hump away.

“Those men must be starving,” Lorenzo said. “They have been cooking the seats out of those old cars. Who wants to eat such things? You should give them a pig, Jefe.”

Uncle Laredo ignored him. The two stumpy Mexicans came over, looking huffy.

“Señor Jefe, we are going to quit now,” the one with the broken teeth said. “We cannot live with this Antonio no more. He has got no morality! These days he is fucking everything. We had better go to town.”

“You should have let him have at that goat I give you last week,” Uncle L said. “You ate it too quickly. It might have taken some of the ginger out of him.”

“Go on to town,” Lorenzo said. “We do not need complainers on his ranch. Go on now. It is only forty-seven miles. Take a piece of my jerky if you haven’t had your breakfast.”

It occurred to me I could take them to town, if they
weren’t in too big a hurry. When I told them so they both looked so grateful I was afraid they might cry. They were pulling jerky off the clothesline and stuffing it in their pockets.

“You are a kind man, Señor,” one said. “Can we wait in your car? This is not a safe ranch.”

“Sure,” I said. “Have some Dr. Peppers if you’re thirsty.”

Uncle L clearly didn’t care whether they stayed or went, or lived or died. He was over saddling his camel.

“This here’s a Bactrian,” he said, when I went over to watch. “I can’t stand them goddamn dromedaries. They belch all over a man.”

Behind him, piled up in a heap, was what looked like two or three hundred manhole covers. I had never seen so many manhole covers, if that was what they were. The camel Uncle L was saddling was big and yellow and absolutely expressionless. It was still chewing its cud, and its thoughts were elsewhere.

“Are those manhole covers?” I asked. Uncle L looked at me as if I were simply too much. He was one of the many people who made me feel that everything I said was stupid, that everything I asked was obvious, and that everything I did was ineffectual.

“You better get your ass back to that school you’re supposed to be going to,” he said. “Can’t you even recognize a manhole cover when you see one?”

“I thought that’s what they were,” I said apologetically. I would have bitten my tongue off rather than ask why he happened to have three hundred manhole covers piled behind his windmill. Uncle L didn’t explain. The camel kneeled, Uncle L got on him, and the camel rose again. “I’ll be back about dark,” Uncle L said. The big yellow camel seemed to float away, into the distance.

Old Lorenzo hobbled over and began to milk the other camel.

“The Jefe is getting old, Señor Danny,” he said. “He will not last many more years. His constitution is not so good, you know. Now myself, I am as good as ever, even though I am older than him. I seem to be made of iron. Often I do not even sleep at night.”

When he had finished milking he drank from the foaming bucket and then offered the bucket to me. I took it, thinking of Jill Peel. She had sometimes drunk camel’s milk. I remembered how nice she looked in her windbreaker and pants and blue sneakers. The milk was warm and full of foam and smelled of camel’s hair. I took a swallow and almost gagged. Uncle L and the camel had floated almost out of sight.

To get out of the blazing sun for a minute I went in and reexplored the house. On the third floor there was an exercise room, equipped with a chinning bar, wall weights, and a rowing machine. The rowing machine was in a kind of solarium, from which one could look out across endless miles of desert. I tried a little rowing, but the machine was badly rusted and squeaked horribly.

In one corner of the solarium was the largest medicine ball I had ever seen. I decided at once to steal it. I took a nap in the library, on a lavender Victorian chaise, and when I woke up I kicked the medicine ball down three flights of stairs and lugged it out to the car. The sight of it seemed to delight the two vaqueros. They were stretched out, one in the back seat, one in the front, drinking Dr. Peppers. Relief seemed to have made them giddy.

“You had better steal the wolf, Señor,” one said. “If you don’t steal it Antonio is going to fuck it one of these days. Goddamn he is fucking everything that’s got a hole.”

“I don’t think the wolf has a hole, anymore,” I said.

“If he has got a hole Antonio will fuck him, pretty soon,” the man said.

I went back to the fourth-story porch and sat there with
an old spyglass I found, until the sun fell. The great black shadow of the great black house gradually stretched itself across the kitchen pasture. The five spotted pigs were trying to root out a fence post. To the west, the lower sky became purple. It was eerie to imagine how Lord Montstuart must have felt, sitting there evening after evening for ten years, watching the empty land and the great sky. Perhaps his mistress had talked when he hadn’t wanted her to. Perhaps she had had the upper hand, and had given Lord Montstuart a bad time. Perhaps he drank too much brandy, watching the sunsets all alone. In the stillness I heard the clomp of hooves and Uncle L came riding in. From where I sat it was a long drop to the ground. Perhaps Lord Montstuart had fallen in love with the air, or with the distance, or with the thought of the plunge, and had decided to share his new love with his old. The sky was purple, orange, golden, yellow, blue.

Below me, Uncle L was trying to start his jeep. It was an old green army jeep, without a seat. He had piled some of the manhole covers in it, to sit on. Lorenzo was sitting in the back of the jeep, on some firewood, holding a Winchester. Uncle L held a Winchester across his lap. I ran downstairs and grabbed my parka out of the car. The blazing sun was gone. Before I could get to the jeep Uncle L had begun to honk.

“Martha’s particular about when she eats,” he said. Martha was his wife. He had married her only three years before, after eighty-nine years of bachelorhood. I had never met her. She lived on her own ranch, some miles away.

We bounced off into the desert just as the sun was setting. In the three years that he had been married Uncle L had established a traditional route from his ranch to Martha’s, but it was only a route, not a road. He roared down into
gullies and across washouts as if he were on El Caballo instead of in an antiquated jeep. We bounced and rattled. The ridges in the far distance were black and the first stars were very bright gold. Neither Uncle L nor Lorenzo had a word to say. We passed Uncle L’s buffalo herd, dull brown shapes in the dusk. There was the smell of dust and sage in the clear air.

Seeing the buffalo reminded me of a story I had always loved. It had to do with Old Man Goodnight. Some Indians had broken off their reservation and come to Goodnight and asked him for a buffalo, and when he reluctantly gave them one they ran it down and killed it with their lances, on the plains in front of his house.

To me it was the true end of the West. A few sad old Indians, on sad skinny ponies, wearing rags and scraps of white man’s clothes and carrying old lances with a few pathetic feathers dangling from them, begging the Old Man of the West for a buffalo, one buffalo of the millions it had once been theirs to hunt. He got tired of being pestered and gave them one, and they flailed their skinny old horses into a run and chased the buffalo and killed it, in the old way. Then all they did was sit on their horses and look at it awhile, the winds of the plains fluttering their rags and their few feathers. It was all over. From then on all they would have was their longing. I wondered what Mr. Goodnight had felt, watching it all from his front porch. I didn’t know. I just knew it was a great story, full of tragedy. I didn’t know exactly whose story it was, but I knew it was great.

We roared up on a high ridge and came out on a kind of plateau. Suddenly Uncle L veered over right to the rim of the plateau and stopped the jeep. Far to the west we could see a light blinking.

“That’s Martha’s house,” he said. He took his Winchester
and walked over to the rim of the hill and looked south. There was a pile of stones near where he had stopped the jeep. It was where El Caballo was buried—El Caballo, the horse. It was also where Uncle L and Lorenzo kept their nightly watch for Zapata. Long before Uncle L had married Martha he and Lorenzo had come to the plateau nightly, to watch for Zapata. They had both fought with him. They had also fought with Villa. Before that Uncle L had fought with the Texas Rangers, and before that—literally—had fought with the Seventh Cavalry, in Wyoming in the 1890s. After the battle of Wounded Knee he came south, first to the Rangers, then to Zapata. That was where he had met Lorenzo.

Lorenzo got out of the jeep and began to unload the firewood. He would stay near the cairn of El Caballo and wait for Zapata, while Uncle L and I went on to have supper with Martha. Any night, Zapata might come. He might need them again. The man who had been shot, whose picture had been shown to the world—that was not Zapata at all. It was only his cousin, a stupid fellow. Zapata was in the hills, biding his time. Some night he would cross the river and come to the campfire of his old companions. They would sit on the rimrock and make plans and clink their gold. Uncle L actually kept a sack of gold in the jeep, in case Zapata needed money when he came.

Lorenzo built his little fire and Uncle L waited until it was flaming. Then he fired three shots into the dark sky. It was a signal—actually, two signals. Ten miles away, in the house with the winking light, Martha would hear the shots and set the supper table, and, somewhere in the hills of Mexico, if he needed to, if he was ready to come, Emiliano Zapata would hear them and know that things were ready. Pancho Villa had been stupid—Pancho Villa was mortal flesh. It had been good sport to ride with him, but
in the end he was only another bandit. Zapata was immortal. El Caballo was the Horse. The shots cracked across the darkening land, and Uncle L got back in the jeep without saying a word. We left Lorenzo crouching by the fire.

The stars were very bright when we left the ridge. I felt apprehensive. I didn’t know what I was doing, in a jeep in the desert with Uncle L. He wasn’t my kind of man at all. He wasn’t crazy and nice, he was crazy and mean. I had nothing to say to him and he had nothing to say to me. He drove grimly, swerving now and then to avoid running over goats.

Unlike Uncle L, Martha raised goats seriously. They seemed to be everywhere. Uncle L seemed to resent having to swerve. He honked furiously. The yard of Martha’s house was full of bleating shapes. Uncle L parked right in the center of a sea of goats. There must have been hundreds. The ranch house was a one-story adobe building, a dark bulk beyond the goats. Through the open door we could see a table with a kerosene lamp on it. A woman stood by the table, holding a rifle by the barrel.

“She sees that hair she’s apt to think you’re a goddamn Comanche,” Uncle L said. A number of goats poked their noses into the jeep. Uncle L kicked a space clear and got out. I did the same. At the door of the house Uncle L stopped and took off his hat.

“You don’t need no firearms,” he said. “It’s just me and my idiot nephew.”