So Brave, Young, and Handsome (26 page)

In the morning I spoke with the bald doctor, then went to see Siringo and give him his tepid breakfast.

“I am leaving today,” I told him, when he had managed a few bites.

He would not reply but put his right eye upon me. Certainly there was some pepper in there but he would not pick up the pencil and write.

“I am leaving you in the care of Dr. Slane,” I said.

His gaze slid off me toward the wall. For no good reason I felt like a betrayer but bucked up and said, “I see you are worse this morning, I am sorry about that. I doubt we will see one another again. Goodbye.”

Only then did he lurch and get hold of the pencil.
I will outlast
is what he wrote.

I left him that way and picked up my bag and went down to the train station. The man behind the window said, “Well?”

“Well what?”

“East or west?” said he.

A group of young women was also heading for California. Zealous botanists, they left the train at every stop to hunt local wildflowers, which they suspended in bunches from the coach ceiling. The drying blossoms swayed overhead, purple asters, orange skyrockets, white blooms plain as your chin but with the stunning name of heliotropes; most dangled low enough so passengers had to dodge them to walk, but it was also true we had the best-smelling coach on the train and no one minded except a soft banker in a homburg who sneezed hard under the waving flora.

Straightaway I got out pen and blotter, meaning to write Susannah an explanation—to describe why I was continuing west, though I had already been away longer than my intended six weeks. Certainly my reasons were passable. They had to do with allegiance, with my implicit promise to Glendon to help him “see this through.”

Indeed my travels—willing and forced—had already carried me too near completion to turn back now. Yet once again I found the letter quite impossible to write. As New Mexico rumbled past, then blanched Arizona, I searched through the cars until I found a conductor familiar with the Rienda Valley. He didn’t know Blue or the name Soto but knew the river itself because he had fished it once for three weeks with his father and uncles.

“At first it comes down fast and steep and it’s a long way between pools,” said this conductor. “We thought we’d lost one of my uncles, Bret, in the rapids, but he was sitting underwater in one of the deep pools hanging onto a rock. Bret could hold his breath for two minutes—until we started to think, Where’s Bret? Then he’d
bust up out of the water right behind you, frighten you into old age.”

“Where do the orchards begin?”

“The gradient lessens, the river levels out. It slows, gets wide, the hills are broad and tillable. That’s your citrus country. If this Soto is there, someone will know him.”

I thanked the conductor and returned to my seat. On the way I picked up a recent Los Angeles newspaper that had a front-page picture of a marching army. Skipping the weighty headlines I meandered to the book section. There was a new Zane Grey, but then there is always a new Zane Grey; also a novel called
Freckles
about a disadvantaged boy who lives in the woods and falls in love with an angel. In the gossip corner was mention of Boyd Singleton Ample, who’d recently passed through Los Angeles. Boyd let drop he was working on a book about five brothers who go adventuring to sea and are all killed in a freak storm that then whips ashore and kills their parents too, so that no one is left of the family except the grandma who goes on lighting candles for twenty more years. Shutting my eyes I imagined Boyd: a destined figure in the grasp of his story, perfect strong sentences pouring out of his pen. I fell asleep that way. When I woke in the dark I was smiling—it’s a happy thing to brace for a visit from old friend Envy who then for some reason never shows up.

A boy in a Ford A gave me a ride far down the Rienda Valley. I had made inquiries after disembarking and the conductor was right: People knew Claudio Soto. As for the valley, it looked distressed. The boy informed me there had been frosts the previous two winters; many orchards had been abandoned or fallen into the hands of bankers. This youngster was roughly Hood Roberts’s age, yet he faced forward as Hood had never done, driving the Ford with an eyebrow raised as though on the lookout for better prospects. He expounded on the nature of citrus trees and how they grew, how they responded to cold weather. Himself the son of citrus growers, he couldn’t wait to get away from the business. He wanted to design buildings—he’d seen architecture in San Francisco that made him short of breath. It seemed to him a better life than orange trees could offer.

“I read where an ice age is coming,” the boy remarked. “There is a glacier in Canada moving in our direction. It’s coming faster all the time! Dr. Horton of Los Angeles says in fifty years we’ll all be Eskimos. We’ll eat seals and live in buildings made out of ice.”

“Do you believe Dr. Horton?”

“I used to,” was his cheery reply.

We drove on. Beside the road appeared a long low wall of native stone. The stones were placed without mortar and some had fallen and the wall wound to and fro like a dog on a walk.

“We’re close,” I said, but the boy was talking about his plans and didn’t hear.

The orchard behind the wall looked starved and skeletal. I sighted an ox harnessed to a flatbed wagon. A man on a ladder was
trimming a tree and tossing the branches on the wagon. His movements were fluid and careful, his hair white as cotton.

“Pull up,” I said.

He steered the A to the side of the road. “See, I’ve got to make money for school. Otherwise it’s back to the orchard for me. I’ll end up like that hired hand there, on a ladder my whole life.”

I opened the door and stepped out and leaned back in for my bag.

“What—is this the place you’re looking for?”

The ox regarded us and the man kept at his work. He worked easily, twisting carefully on his ladder. We could hear sharp cracks as the cut branches struck the flatbed. We were at a distance and I knew his eyes weren’t the best.

I handed the boy some money.

He said, “Hey, if that’s your friend—”

“It’s all right.”

He was a very decent youngster. I shook his hand and started to tell him good luck—my voice caught, though, so I just waved him down the road. Partly it was the boy and his easy talk and high hopes. Partly it was just that I hadn’t been around a friend in so long, and now Glendon was climbing down from his ladder, looking quizzically in my direction with his bad old eyes. For the first time in weeks I felt that lights were on somewhere for me.

Until he was within fifty feet he couldn’t tell it was me but angled up slowly as though I might be the tax man or maybe Siringo himself. When I said hello, his face changed to certainty and he dropped his pruning saw and charged, in his delight not even saying my name but laughing and getting me round the middle and lifting me straight off the earth, slight as he was. I laughed too—I couldn’t help it. He lifted me a foot in the air, set me down, then lifted me again. Whoop! Something was new about Glendon; it took me a little time to discern it.

“Why ain’t you home with Susannah?” he said, poking my chest.

“Where’s this Blue of yours?” I replied.

“How’d you shake off old Siringo?”

“What did she say when you showed up?”

We tossed up questions like confetti, as long-parted friends do; but in fact we had not been parted long, it only seemed that way. Soon the weight of undelivered news bore in and I turned quiet. Glendon looked dismayed.

“What news of our friend Hood?” he asked, in a reluctant tone.

I looked at his eyes and he turned them from me.

“Hood is dead, Glendon. I’m sorry to say it.”

He nodded as though expecting these dread tidings. I waited for him to speak but he couldn’t and ran his rough fingers over his head.

“Do you want to hear about it?”

He nodded again. I kept it short but tried to give him some context with the Spigot fire and the empty farmhouse and the counterfeit bullets. Siringo’s stint as the toast of Columbus I left out, as well as Hood on display in the store window with his feet up.

Glendon sat on the flatbed with his legs dangling. Though built small he’d always given an impression of nimble strength. Now he just looked small—meager, I want to say. He didn’t look at me but at the ground or the gray webwork of trees. A locust buzzed close by and the compliant ox shifted his feet. Glendon made no reply to Hood’s tragedy.

Finally he got up and clucked to the ox, who moved forward at a walk as though a switch had been thrown. I rode on the flatbed with a pile of loose dead limbs while Glendon walked at the ox’s head. In a few minutes a pale pyramid rose out of the gloom and became a pile of branches. The ox stopped at its edge and Glendon and I unloaded the flatbed. The limbs were light but stiff and spiky—you didn’t want to get one in the eye.

He said, “How did Hood seem to you—before Siringo shot him, I mean.”

“We didn’t really get to visit, Glendon.”

“But you saw him. You heard his voice.”

I thought it over. “Well, he was courteous—he said
Mr. Siringo
. He sounded like Hood, you know.”

“Good, that’s good. I’m glad to hear he was polite. That’s our boy.” Without another word he walked away into the trees. I didn’t follow him but stayed with the wagon. Night arrived and stars came out by their thousands every minute. After a little time I heard Glendon returning, walking slowly, picking his way. He put a hand on the ox and said, “All right then, it’s late in the day. Come on, Monte, you should meet Claudio.”

Glendon had reached the Rienda Valley two weeks earlier, riding a sand-colored cowhorse purchased from a shrewd Arizonan midget. He told me this while we moved through the orchard at the rate of a plodding ox. The midget was a hard negotiator with a voice like a kazoo but had the quality atypical in horse traders of stating a beast’s flaws alongside its heroic attributes. He knew horses like no one Glendon had ever met, especially their legs, where so many animals are prone to catastrophe. The mare he sold Glendon was named Sparrow and carried him without complaint clear down the Gila River to Yuma, where he stood on a hill overlooking the adobe ramparts of the famous territorial prison. Glendon’s voice hushed at the word
Yuma
, of whose ravages he had heard from experienced compadres: the sun beating through latticed ironwork, the brazed manacles set into the stone floor. Viewing the penitentiary from his far hilltop Glendon had no way of knowing it had been shut down years earlier and posed no threat. He crossed the Gila and a short while later the weedy Colorado before veering northwest toward a bank of dunes he knew from long ago. He was in familiar country and so was surprised when a lake appeared shining where there had been only dry and saline earth. The lake was too large to see across, too large to be misplaced. Riding Sparrow along the water’s edge he wondered at his memory until an Indian woman emerging from a tilted house informed him the Colorado had breached its banks a decade before and created this new ocean. At its bottom lay the bones of a town named Salton. Glendon had stopped in Salton twenty years before and done a little business in the saloon—he told the woman so, but she wasn’t
interested. She hated the lake. Its water grew more bitter year by year. Glendon rode on.

While I was still in New Mexico, waiting for Charles Siringo to emerge from his ravings, Glendon trotted down out of the Vallecitos into a watershed of bubbling streams and species of flowered prairie grasses he had not seen in thirty years. At the bottom of this valley a slender river twisted through farms and small ranchos where the cowhorse Sparrow had to be dissuaded from testing herself on the feral longhorns lurking against the hillsides. The vaqueros Glendon encountered in this promising valley didn’t look like the desperates with whom he had rustled thousands of cattle in his youth. They were clean and strong with straight lustrous teeth and direct eyes suggesting a hold on the future. Their horses were muscled and full-barreled, larger and prettier than Spanish ponies. These cowboys didn’t mind a lone horseman traveling through and confirmed for Glendon that the river he followed was in fact the Rienda. Yes, it went all the way to the ocean. Yes, a region of citrus orchards awaited him downriver. No doubt the cowboys sensed in this veteran horseman a lush deposit of stories, for they asked him to stay for an evening of music and fiery drink, but Glendon said no, he was too near the end of his own tale now. He nudged Sparrow and they continued on, keeping the river on their left.

Days of asking brought him to a valley of crippled trees. Some had leaves in the lowermost branches but many were dead brittle. He rode Sparrow through this shinbone copse, hopeless all of it except for one small quarter of dwarfish citrus with branches underfed but at least green below the bark. Emerging from these Sparrow stepped into a broad grassy lane that led to a painted two-story wrapped in a porch. A man sat on the porch in a ladderback chair. He was sleeping but woke as Glendon rode up. An ash cane lay across his lap and he took it up and touched the floorboards with it.

“Are you Claudio Soto?” Glendon asked.

“Yes.”

“Did you marry Ar
ā
ndano Ordonez?”

Claudio stood from his chair and held onto it for balance. He had long graying hair that thinned and reached his shoulders in coarse wisps.

“Is she at home now?”

“No. What is it you want?”

Glendon sat on his horse wondering what to say.

“You may come in if you like,” said Claudio.

“Maybe we could talk out here.”

The two men stood in the dusty yard, Claudio leaning on his cane. He bore Glendon no hint of a grudge. In fact he seemed pleased to meet at last the man he had long thought of as a fabled rogue—the winsome gringo who married the local girl only to vanish just ahead of horse soldiers sent by then-president Díaz. Claudio saw himself as the beneficiary of this desertion. He was a gentleman. In all his years with Ar
ā
ndano, he had not asked her for the details of her first marriage.