The Sound of the Trees Read online

  He paused for a moment. Then he raised his hands palms up at the boy.

  Where is this man? This man with the horses. Where is this girl? I am sorry, but you are looking very bad. Very bad and tired. And wrong. Mira, is this girl here? No, she is not here. Is she on the other side of the mountains? Is she on the other side of the mountains waiting for you? Who can say. She is gone, that is all. She is not here. Because she was with you once maybe you think she cannot be gone, but she is. Pero, this is not me. This is you and this girl I do not know. All I know is she is gone.

  The man lowered his head and tilted it to try and catch the boy’s eyes but the boy cast them low by his feet and would not turn them up to the man. Then the man leaned back and looked at the remains of his cigarette in the lantern’s weak light.

  It is no easy business, he went on with a deep inward breath, but you must be graceful about these things. You must keep grace in your heart. For it is the thing that lets you lose.

  The boy raised his hands from his lap and wiped his face dry. He turned his head toward the window and away from the woman. The woman looked pleadingly at the man but the man kept his eyes on the boy while he ground out his cigarette in the bowl.

  You can work, no?

  The boy looked up at him with his hands still upon his face. The woman passed the cloth napkin across the table to him, but the boy would not touch it. The man now spoke with a certain patience to the boy, as though he might to a worried child. Of course you can work, he said. You can drive truck?

  No.

  Pero, you can work in the fields?

  The boy set his hands palms down on the table. Thank you sir, he said. But I can’t stay here. I got to get on.

  Yes, the man said.

  I reckon it’s my will.

  Yes.

  The woman looked a long time at her husband who sat staring at the table. The boy studied the man’s averted face then nodded at the woman and tried to smile at her but could not.

  Explain, she said to her husband in Spanish. Digale la realidad.

  She put her hand on the man’s coarse hair and stroked it for a moment. Then she rose and nodded solemnly to the boy, saying, There are beans some more if you like, and resigned herself to the dark recesses of the room.

  The man raised his head and looked back at her. He smiled a little. Then he rose from the table, going first to the bedside and then to the children’s sideboard, and returning with the crushed stub of candle. He lit it and extinguished the lantern. The man’s clean white shirt glowed brightly in the candle-light. The boy studied his face for some betrayal of emotion but none came. Finally the man sat again by the single candle flame.

  He told the boy his own story about when he was young and left Mexico. He told him how he had no people anymore and that the people he met were not at all like him and didn’t even speak the same words. He told him how he rode into America in the back of a dairy truck beneath empty milk jars and how he slipped past the border patrol. He told him how the men who drove him dropped him off in the middle of the desert and how he wandered through the land as if it were no land at all but only some foul dream long extended. He told the boy how he too had lost his grace and how he had tired of the world, as he suspected the boy himself had.

  The man stopped to pull on his cigarette. He scratched his stubbled jaw. The smoke rose invisibly from his fingers and drifted between them where it took form in the light of the candle.

  Then he told the boy that the world was tired also. He told him how the world had aged long past their knowledge and that it was tired of carrying them around on its sore back. And he leaned closer to the boy and the boy could see the man’s own age and how his face was detailed by life and he knew he spoke from the heart. Then the man said that the most important thing he must remember is that the world would never quit them, that the world was like God because no matter what you do, it never leaves and it never gives up.

  With this the man leaned back and stared at the table again. The boy peered out the window. Dogs were barking in the distance. A thin remnant of a locomotive’s hollow whistle sounded in the night.

  I ain’t sayin I’m tired of anything. The boy’s voice came cracked and muffled against the window glass. And I don’t have any notions about quittin.

  The man raised his eyes and looked across the candle’s flame at the boy. Rarely do men think that, he said. But if you know how to watch a man, you can see it in the way his eyes work.

  The boy put his elbows on the table and looked down. My eyes work fine, he said.

  The man made a fleeting gesture with his hand. His own eyes fell to the table and his face softened. The boy worked his hands together and when the man looked up again the boy saw that his face had grown very serious.

  I will tell you only one more thing, he said. My mother always warn me against this and now I warn you too. No dejes la oscuridad convertise visible.

  They sat in silence. The man smoked. The boy ran his fingers along the edges of the table. The man tapped his cigarette against the rim of the bowl. He watched the boy as he looked out the window where the sun had just summoned the first film of red heat along the horizon. The man turned and looked out at the light bending around the contours of the hills.

  The rain is past and gone, he said. You should sleep well.

  * * *

  He sat at the table in a small flume of light. The woman fed him eggs and bread and milk and coffee. The children had gone off to play in the fields and the man was straightening up things by the beds. He wore woolen slippers that shushed against the wood-grain floor.

  You are leaving? the woman asked.

  Yes ma’am. There’s a town nearby, right?

  Yes.

  I reckon I should go there. I need a job. I’m near out of money.

  The man shuffled into the kitchen and stood over the sink basin where the dishes from the previous night were piled up. He had shaved and his slick face shone in the morning light. There were tomatoes on the windowsill and he took one down and bit into it and set it back down. You are go to find the girl? he said.

  The boy looked into his coffee. The man began to scrub the plates. Four hours in the truck, he said. But the truck is broken. I can no take you.

  That’s alright. I’m ridin anyways.

  Yes. Your horses. I saw them this morning.

  The man stopped scrubbing the plates and turned to the boy.

  They are very thin.

  Yes sir. I’m going to see to that.

  At the door the woman embraced the boy. He did not expect her to do so and her arms around him were warm. He smiled at her and thanked her again and she stepped back and put her arm around her husband’s waist. The man fixed the collar of his shirt and held his hand forth and the boy took it.

  He told the boy that he hoped he found what he was looking for, whether it was the girl or not. He told him also that he hoped he would find a place to stay very soon because the language of the lone man quickly becomes a language only he can understand.

  They stopped shaking. The man held fast to the boy’s hand. Then he said, Go and find her. Is okay. He patted the boy’s chest with an open palm. I know how it is in there. He made a shy smile. I have boys too, he said. Younger, but boys. Like you.

  * * *

  THE FLEDGLING TOWN he came upon stood in a valley between Apache Mountain in the north and the Tularosas in the southeast. When the boy took the switchback on the last hill and stepped into the gravel road, he began to see the shape of it. It was built in the manner of the old Spanish piazzas. The brown adobe buildings stood in a circle and all were at least two stories high. Dirt alleyways ran back between them like wheel spokes. Inside the circle was a hard black road, glistening and bending in the sun. In the middle of the road stood an enormous willow tree. Its long arms were beginning to blossom white and at that hour they shaded the plaza almost entirely.

  The horse stammered momentarily when her feet hit the pavement. The boy eased her down with
his hand on her barrel and steered her to the side of the road and clicked his tongue for the mule to follow. They went slowly past the storefronts. A few people walked the porch floors and some came out to watch the boy as he passed. He looked over at the tree as he came abreast of it. A group of old Navajo women sat crosslegged around the trunk. By their sides stood crack-legged oak shelves on rusty wheels that were overflowing with buttons and mosaics and blankets and sashes of dog hair and feather.

  From the corners of the new buildings children flashed in and out of sight and their calls hung in the still air and could be heard in all quarters of the town. He passed a storefront with a half-constructed facade. He turned his head and watched as two men drove latillas into the nail beds. The boy was entranced by his return to such a world of people and movement and did not notice the truck idling in the alleyway he blocked until the sound of a horn made both horse and rider jerk back.

  Hey cowboy.

  The man leaned his nose into the dash. The boy settled the mare and peered in through the windshield. Yes sir?

  The man leaned closer to the glass.

  Get the fuck out of the way, he mouthed.

  The boy watched him a moment longer, then reared the mare back. The truck burned out onto the road. He watched it go and could see the driver shaking his head through the cloud of dust. Across the plaza three men were leaning on a green car, watching the boy. The boy glanced over at them as he passed. Their look was neither welcoming nor hostile. The boy balled up the reins and gave his mare a little kick.

  He came at last to a cantina. In front hung a heavy canvas awning and on it an inscription that read Garrets. It batted intermittently against the wind, against the barking of workers and the rattle of truck beds in the streets.

  The boy hobbled his horse and mule on the portales of the cantina. He dusted off his pant legs with his gloved hand then removed his gloves and pushed them in his rear pocket. He knocked his boots at the threshold and stepped inside.

  It was a long room with a low ceiling. Pale blue electric lights hung from above in cheap plaster casings. On the counter by the door an old till stood with its drawer open and beside it was a bowl of peppermint candies and a tube of toothpicks. A glass display offered three different sliced pies which sat motionless inside of it on a metal wheel plate. Along the windows was a line of booths with benches like high-backed church pews and on the left a bar top where two old men sat drinking coffee and smoking cigars.

  The two men were looking at the boy, their cigars still upraised to their mouths. They quickly studied him up and down and hunched over their coffee mugs again.

  He sat in a booth by the back. A middle-aged woman sitting at the end of the counter stood and held her apron from her waist and bunched it in her hands, then dropped it and went into the kitchen. After a while she came back through the folding kitchen doors and stood by the boy. He was rolling a cigarette and gazing out at the plaza. The waitress tapped her pencil against the table. You movin cattle, young man? she said.

  The boy looked up at her. A long flare of yellow hair fanned over one of her eyes. She guided it back with the pencil.

  No ma’am.

  The waitress pulled a crushed notebook from her apron pocket and pressed the top sheet flat. She rested the edge of her hand against it to keep it from curling up again. I figured maybe you come on before the rest of those Texans supposed to be movin through this month, she said. The fellas from Wyoming left out of here two days ago, so I figured you for an early Texan.

  No ma’am. I’m just passin through.

  That right? Well, I suppose you’d have to in these parts.

  Ma’am?

  The waitress took her hand from the notepad and placed it on her waist. This here’s the only town for many a mile, she said. She paused and looked up at the ceiling as if the county map lay suspended above her. I’m goin to guess you haven’t been here before.

  No.

  Now see, she said with some urgency, this here town is goin to be something. I came all the way from California. I heard about it all the way out there. Must mean something. Bigger than Santa Fe, they say. This side of the state, if you’re goin north, you’re bound to pass through here. And once the railroad gets laid. Shew.

  She shook her head and smiled suggestively, looking at the boy like she had revealed some secret of which she was deeply proud. She put her hands on her hips when she saw the boy was not smiling.

  Well hell, she said. So what’s your plan, anyways?

  The boy twisted the cigarette between his fingers. I can’t say I could name it, he said.

  Well, you ought to think about right here if you ain’t settled on anything. She moved her hair away from her eyes with the pencil again. This place is growin every day.

  The waitress returned a while later with a platter of potatoes and a fried steak and a bowl of chili peppers and an ashtray which she placed on the corner of the table. Coffee?

  Yes ma’am.

  She turned and the boy caught her gently by the arm. He asked her if there was a livery stable in town and she said No.

  Somewhere to lay up then?

  Surely.

  She pointed out the window and across the plaza to a four-story inn with porches the full width of the building on every floor. Abner’s, she said. It’s still sort of dirty, if you catch my meaning, but that’s all we got right now.

  He ate in the same slow methodical manner as he had during the heavy days of the mountains. When he finished eating he sat back and drank his coffee. After a while he took out his billfold where he had placed most of his remaining dollars. He took out two bills and set them on the table. They were as soft and flimsy as cotton. He set the salt shaker upon them and put on his hat and wiped the ash from the table and started out.

  Ford’s stable is down the road a piece if you ain’t mindin to ride a stretch.

  The boy turned to the old men at the counter who in turn regarded him through their cigar smoke.

  It’s just west a ways and the ride is easy, one of them said. No rain or nothin here for a while and it’s mostly plain and pastureland. That horse of yours shod?

  No sir.

  Well if you’re plannin to stay here, you ought take care of that.

  I don’t know that I am.

  Well, there’s some good shows here for a kid like you.

  The men smiled conspiratorially at each other. One of them had a great bulbous nose that wobbled like rubber when he grinned. The other pointed out the window to the east.

  Back yonder there’s a grand old place for shows.

  What kind of shows?

  The man with the nose scoffed.

  Come on, son. Ballet shows of course. Western style.

  I don’t reckon I’ve seen such shows.

  Both men laughed and pounded the counter with their fists.

  Well, you ought to, kid. You ought to.

  The men went on laughing. The boy walked past them and pulled open the door.

  Hey kid.

  He turned with his hand propping the door open and the last light from outside falling red upon his boots.

  Charlie Ford. That’s the man’s name. He’ll take care of you. May even have some work for you. He still moves em about like the olden days. You’ll know you’re there when you see a big old truck stickin out of the ground like a tree with wheels. No shit, kid. Like a goddamn tree machine.

  * * *

  The inn’s foyer was dark and low. He walked past tan leather chairs that stood worn and vacant and illuminated by yellow-glassed lamps under which whorls of dust spun dully. He rang the bell at the counter. A clock ticked loudly in the empty room and finally a tall heavyset man appeared from a doorway behind the counter with a filthy napkin tucked under his shirt collar. He put a finger up while he finished chewing and pulled a pencil from his shirt pocket.

  Evenin, the boy said.

  Yeah. You need a room?

  Yes sir.

  You seen which girl you want yet?<
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  Girl? The boy looked around the room from which no such girls appeared. No sir, he said. Just me.

  The proprietor brought the napkin to his face and wiped it across his mouth. Just you, he said. He fumbled around the undershelving. I got a room on the plaza side.

  How much does it go for?

  Four dollars.

  The boy brought out his billfold and flipped through the bills. Anything cheaper?

  The proprietor put the pencil back in his shirt pocket. Son, he said, I had General Sandoz in that room last week. Said this town was goin to be the model for the new West. That’s what he called it. Said every one of us would be Paul Bunyans and John Henrys before all’s said and done. For that I think four dollars is cheap.

  The boy moved his fingers over the bills again. He shook his head.

  Where you from, boy? Mexico?

  Grant County.

  The proprietor looked him up and down.

  You sure as hell look like you could be from Mexico exceptin for your eyes, and I’m not afraid to tell you that.

  Well I ain’t. And I don’t rightly see where that could matter.

  The man glanced over his shoulder out the door. That yours out there?

  The boy turned to follow the man’s gaze. Triften stood nosing the ground, the slow roll and sway of her head somehow elegant in the new dark.

  Yeah.

  You got any alfalfa? Or oats for that matter?

  Yeah.

  Then I’ll tell you what. You feed my Katie Mae out there in the back and I’ll give you the room for two dollars. I done forgot about goin to the store for her today. Bein so busy and all. The man shot his small eyes to the staircase. A man can tend to forget these things, he said. You can sure write me down for that.

  The boy shifted his hat in his hands. Well, he said. I reckon I’m more concerned myself about bein wrote down for a room.

  He held out the money and the proprietor snatched it from him and snapped down the napkin from beneath his chin. He raised a brown leather-bound book from the undershelving and took the pencil from his shirt again and followed the entries down with his finger and scratched down the boy’s name.