Fire on the Mountain (9 page)

Afterwards we rested in the latticed, inadequate shade of the windmill, chewing on the jerky which the old man brought from his saddlebags. The air was hot and still, the windmill static, though far off in the desert we could see the play of the whirlwinds, pillars of dust dancing like ghosts over the plain.

While the dust-devils played on the lowlands the clouds were piling up on the crest of the mountains, great cumuli-nimbi charged with lightning and thunder, dark with power and possible rain.

The clouds formed, the whirlwinds danced, but the air of the desert remained static as a sea of glass, full of heat and suspense, but inert. Inert—like us. We did not talk. I gazed at the sky and the clouds, and the old man, stretched on the ground with his hat over his face, snored softly in his slumber. I wanted to sleep myself but I couldn’t—a strange excitement kept my nerves alert, and I felt the rapid beating of my heart.

Nothing would happen today. The sun would fall over the mountains, the clouds grumble and the buzzards soar, but nothing would happen. I knew that. And to me it seemed all so marvelous I liked it that way. I wanted no irrelevant event to mar or cut short the crystal stasis of the long deep desert afternoon. Tonight, perhaps. Or tomorrow. But not this day.

The clouds spoke in a muted rumble over the barren mountains and a flicker of lightning, like an illuminated nerve, shot through the tallest of the thunderheads. The roll of thunder faded off and nothing happened.

I rolled over and lay on my belly, pulled a stem of timothy from its casing, chewed on it and stared at the flies and ants and beetles crawling sluggishly about in the shady weeds at the base of the water tank. A siender
straw-colored scorpion emerged from a crevice beneath a stone, crawling toward a fly. The fly, unaware, was inspecting a fragment of cow dung with his nervous forelegs. The scorpion glided close, the tail with its poison bulb and red curved stinger arched above the head, the big crab claws reaching forward. The fly took off. I killed the scorpion. Not because he was a scorpion but because he was unlucky.

The old man grunted, pushed back his hat and opened his red-rimmed eyes. He squinted at the sun, high in the western sky, and stood up. I heard the creak of his old joints. “Mount up, Billy. We’ll take one more look for that buckskin.”

Blue stood with drooping neck and closed eyes in the same poor shade of the windmill, shaking his head, twitching his skin, brushing his tail at the idle flies. I saddled him and climbed aboard. With some reluctance the big horse allowed me to guide him after Grandfather, headed not for home but for the hills again.

We took a different trail this time, one farther to the north and not so steep, that led toward the pass between Thieves’ Mountain and the San Andres. As we slowly climbed I was able to see more and more of the White Sands, that sea of milky dunes that stretched for fifty miles north and south between the desert ranges. Lost somewhere in the middle of that vastness were the new installations of the Proving Grounds.

Giant yuccas loomed up in silhouette before the wild sky and the piled-up masses of clouds. We passed a dead pinyon pine, lightning-blasted, stripped of all its bark, the nude limbs gleaming like silver.

Three ravens flopped off and lumbered away at our approach, squawking like housewives, alarming the pinyon jays higher on the hillside, who at once set up an answering clamor of their own which sounded like “Rain! rain! rain!”

The thunderheads were closer now, as the trail led up toward the mountains. I saw another scribble of lightning pass through the chasms of the clouds and
after a long pause heard the barrage of thunder. But the sun rode clear, the vibrant light blazed down. Higher and higher we rode until we reached the crest of a long ridge and the pinyon-juniper belt once more. Here the air was a few degrees cooler and I felt for the first time the stirring of the troubled air over the mountains.

The old man shouted: “Over there!” He pointed toward the slope of the adjacent ridge, half a mile north. “There he is!” I looked hard but saw nothing alive, saw nothing move except a flight of black wings circling in the sky. My grandfather drew up his horse and waited for me. I stopped near him on the narrow trail and followed with my eyes the line of his arm and forefinger. “You see him, Billy?”

I scrutinized the hillside, the tangle of mesquite, yucca and oak brush, the jumbled boulders dappled with cloud shadows. “No sir.”

“Halfway up the hill. See that yellow outcrop,”

I stared closely.

“Just to the left and a little above it. There’s old Rascal.”

Then I saw it, the yellowish shape of a horse spread motionless on the ground. “He’s down, Grandfather.”

“He should be. He’s dead. Can’t you see, his belly’s torn open. Look, the birds are on him now.”

I saw the black buzzards crawling like flies over the prone figure and saw three more buzzards descend. “What happened to him?”

“Let’s find out.” Grandfather spurred Rocky forward. We rode further up the trail till we reached a point on a level with the dead horse, left the trail and made our way through juniper and chaparral around the head of the canyon to the farther ridge. We could no longer see Rascal but we were guided by the scavengers as they circled over him.

We picked our way through the jungle of brush and rock, inventing a trail, until we came within sight and smell of our object. The stench was bad and the horse
hardly recognizable as the one I’d known so well and ridden so much the summer before.

We rode close; the vultures ascended in a cloud of black wings, rags of rotten flesh hanging from their beaks, and circled above the trees.

The horse lay on his side, completely disembowled, the entrails strewn over the stones, the neck and flank ripped open, the eye sockets empty. The smell was so foul we had to ride around him and approach again from the upwind side. Grandfather studied the ground. “The lion was here,” he said. On a patch of dust he showed me the broad round print of the lion’s paw.

“Maybe the lion killed him, Grandfather.”

“I don’t think it likely.” The old man dismounted, letting his horse stand with dangling reins, and walked up to the carcass. I stayed where I was, ten feet away. For several minutes Grandfather stared down at the ruin of our horse. “Have a look at this, Billy.” He motioned to me to come closer.

“I don’t feel very good.”

“You feel sick?”

“Yes sir.”

He nodded, stayed a minute longer, then came back to his horse, stumbling a little on his high heels over the loose rock. He mounted, adjusted his hat, turned the horse and started back the way we had come. I had a glimpse of the dull bewildered fury in his eyes before he turned his back to me.

Afraid to ask any questions, I followed in silence. We reached the trail and proceeded downhill toward home, the horses stepping a bit livelier now. Overhead the clouds boiled and thickened, obscuring the sun, and the thunder boomed louder and louder. I shivered, knotted my bandana around my neck and turned up my collar. Raindrops fell on the warm boulders beside the trail, spattering the stone with dark spots of moisture which faded as I watched and evaporated into nothing.

We rode at a fast walk down the trail, followed
closely by the forward fringe of the storm. Lightning barked in our rear, casting white flashes of light over the shaking boughs of the pinyons and junipers around us. When I saw Grandfather untie the poncho packed behind the cantle of his saddle I knew we were in for it and I untied mine too. Lightning struck again, so close that I cringed, and old Blue danced forward like a colt. We let our horses break into a trot. I stood up in the stirrups and supported myself with one hand on the saddlehorn. All the aches and pains I’d felt in the morning came back to me now with redoubled emphasis. I wished there weren’t so many miles still remaining between us and the ranch-house.

I looked up. The sky was no longer in sight: instead of a sky we had a low ceiling of cloudmass, purple, swollen and turbulent. Far to the east, however, the sky was still clear and the desert below glowed in the sunlight.

Another flurry of rain fell around us and this time the drops did not fade but multiplied and merged with one another until the surface of the rock gleamed with a uniform wetness. At the same time I realized my shirt was getting wet: I put on the rubber poncho.

We reached the foot of the trail, trotted past the windmill and corral and headed east on the dirt road home. The golden plains extended before us clear to the Guadalupes, shining with light, but the edge of that light receded faster than our advance and a moment later the clouds burst open overhead and down it came, the deluge.

Cold rain pelted my back and shoulders and a continuous stream of water poured off the forward brim of my hat onto Blue’s neck. The road softened beneath us, sand and earth changing into mud, and the horses’ hooves made a spongy sound. My new straw hat began to wilt as the water soaked through it into my hair. Water ran in icy strings down my neck and inside my shirt. I felt miserable—wet, cold, tired, hungry. I found myself hating the bellow of thunder, the lightning with
its dazzling glare on the soaked shrubs and darkened earth around us.

But five minutes later, abruptly, the rain stopped, the lightning ceased and the thunder rolled back to the mountaintops in a series of echoing reverberations from Thieves’ Mountain to the San Andres.

The sun reappeared, burning through a gulf in the shrunken clouds, and blazed on our steaming backs. I took off the poncho and hung my soggy hat on the horn, reshaping it more to my fancy while it was in
a
malleable condition.

We were nearly home. A mile ahead we could see the cottonwoods along the Salado, the group of ranch buildings, and the red
barrancas
beyond. Every detail of the landscape stood out clearly in the slanting amber evening light: I saw the ravens in the trees, Grandfather’s pickup truck parked in the wagonshed, the ranch-house windows aflame with the sun, the Peralta children playing by the windmill, the dogs shaking themselves on the porch, the folds and creases of the eroded clay banks on the far side of the buildings, the chamisa and greasewood glistening on the plain—things, appearances, surfaces vividly precise, dogmatically real, and all of it surmounted by a triumphal double rainbow.

I thought I heard the roll of thunder again. Riding beside Grandfather, I saw him peering to the north, toward the upper reaches of the Salado River. The sound of thunder became continuous, a steady distant roar. “We better hurry,” he said, “the flood’s coming.” Our horses had slowed to a walk when the rain stopped; now we jogged them up again and trotted toward the wash.

As we rode through the grove of cottonwoods under the leaves already dry and fluttering, we heard the roar of the approaching flood come round the bend, though the water itself was still out of sight. The sound now was like that of a railway train.

We splashed through the stream of clear water and
trotted over the sand, the riverbed dry and hot and bright under a clean sky. But before we reached the far side the forelip of the flash flood came rolling around the upstream turn and surged toward us.

Inevitably surprised, I drew up Blue and stopped to watch. The horse fought the bit, stepping sideways. Grandfather turned. “Get outa there!” he shouted. “What’s the matter with you?” Unwillingly at first I gave in, letting the horse start ahead and lope on across the riverbed and up the bank to safety. There I stopped him again and watched the approach of the flood.

Red-brown and thick with mud, splattered with scum and lacy jags of foam, tossing a broken tree on its crest, the flood poured like gravy down the sunny wash. The front of it advanced on a curve in a wall about a foot high, moving as fast as a tired man could run, and swirling out toward each side. Rainbows glittered in the spray, white-caps formed and disappeared and reformed on the roiling surface as the flood came down in greater strength, deepening, shaking the ground on which we stood, filling our ears with its tremendous rumble.

“There goes New Mexico,” the old man shouted at me from a few feet away. “Down the river!” He watched for only a moment, his face somber, then rode away. I stayed for a while, though old Blue stamped and yawed beneath me, in a hurry to get to the corral. Finally I let him have his way: we were both hungry.

By the time I got the horses unsaddled and brushed and at their feed the sun was down. My legs felt hollow, my knees trembled like a baby’s, as I walked toward the ranch-house and the wonderful smell of supper. It was easy to forget the dead horse back in the hills, my pony Rascal rotting away in the soft twilight while the birds sang around him, and the red ants, the beetles and blowflies, attacked his poor stinking corpse.

“No!” Grandfather shouted. “Shot, I tell you! His jaw smashed. Didn’t kill him right away either—the poor brute must have lived for hours. Trying to get back here. They shot him, by God! With a hollow-point bullet, looked like. A hole big as my fist where the slug came out.” The old man slammed his fist on the kitchen table and the lamp jumped and the light and shadows swam crazily over the walls.

Lee studied his cigarette. I worked on my letter home—I’d written one paragraph and didn’t know what else to say, without lying too much. Since there was nothing more I wanted to write I sketched a picture of myself on horseback riding across the White Sands with two buzzards circling above me and a black sun circling above the buzzards. I wasn’t much interested in what I was doing. I was listening closely to the old man’s anger and Lee Mackie’s careful silences.

“Are they trying to
scare
me out of here?” Grandfather asked, chomping on his burnt-out cigar. “Are they fools enough to think they can
scare
me outa my ranch and my home?”

Lee spoke carefully. “Don’t gallop off in all directions, John. You’re the one that’s talking foolish now. How do you know who shot the horse? Or why? Maybe it was an accident.”

Some accident, I said to myself; we should’ve murdered those guys….

“Too many accidents around here,” the old man roared. “I suppose it’s an accident when they drive
trucks through my fences. I suppose it’s just an accident their skyrockets come down on my range and scare the cows so bad we still ain’t found them all. Poor old Eloy went all over the northwest sections today and couldn’t find them creatures nowhere.”