Canyons (2 page)

For his running, he thought now, turning on Yandell Street headed for the apartment over the house where he and his mother lived. I need money only for shoes for running.

It is all I need to do—to run is all there is. When I am running it is all, everything. Nothing matters. Not the father that I do not know or the mother that does not know me or the school that I hate or money or not money—all of that disappears when I run.

When I float. When I run and float. God, he thought, his legs felt like they belonged to somebody else, somebody who never became tired, and when he looked down at them pumping, driving, moving him forward they marveled him. From all the running, from the daily running in the streets and up the hills they had become so strong he didn’t know them.

There was traffic but he keyed his steps and ran across the street at an angle, picking up speed as he passed in front of
an army pickup from Fort Bliss. I can run for all of time, run forever.

It was May and very hot, close to ninety in the shade. But dry heat—always dry heat in the desert—and it didn’t take him down. Nothing took him down.

Except being home.

There was that, he thought, turning up the block and seeing their apartment and his mother’s old Volkswagen, knowing that he would not be able to be with himself any longer. Only home took him down.

She had company.

She belonged to one of those parents-without-husbands groups or whatever they were and from time to time she would bring different people around and he would have to meet them. He tried to be nice to them, but they always looked at him with open pity and he didn’t feel that he should be pitied simply because he didn’t know his father, had never met him, didn’t know who he was, or any of the other ways they put it. The truth was he had never really had a father and so it didn’t matter.

But she went to these meetings and she told everything about herself at the meetings, which included him, and everything about him, and so these people he didn’t know knew all about him and would come to the house with her sometimes and sit and pity him.

They all wanted to “share,” and “care,” and “get in touch with their feelings,” and on and on. The first few times they had come and met with his mother in their kitchen he
had thought it might be all right and that his mother might get out of herself. But after a time, and many, many meetings, it just seemed that she was spending all her time messing with herself and not trying to really fix anything.

And I have to go in, he thought. I have to work for Stoney and that means I have to change clothes and get jeans on to go to work and that means I have to go inside. If it were not for that, he would run past the apartment and keep running for a half hour or so, until the company was gone.

Maybe if he just whipped in and changed, he could get away before he got nailed.

But it didn’t work that way.

He ran up the back steps and into the kitchen, where his mother was sitting with a man.

He was pleasant enough. Tall, slightly heavy, with short hair.

“Brennan,” his mother said, “I’d like you to meet Bill Halverson.”

Brennan nodded. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

And that was it, or he thought it was. Brennan went into his room and changed quickly and threw on a T-shirt and made his way back outside to jog down to Stoney’s place to ride in his old pickup out to mow lawns.

Later he would think back on this time; later when he had begun to try to find his spirit and see the dance of the sun, later when his life was torn to pieces and he was trying to make it whole again, he would look back on this moment,
this exact moment when it started, and wonder how it could be.

How anything so big could come from something so small and simple.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

And it changed his whole life.

Coyote Runs let the small brown pony pick its way down the side of a dry wash and thought that it was as his spirits, the spirits of the dust, had told him—everything was perfect.

The afternoon before they left on the ride south to Mexico he had gone to the ancient medicine place, the secret place, and had spoken to his spirits to ask for guidance and bravery to have a thick neck and be a man. He had waited for a long time and nothing came and he was beginning to worry that it was all wrong, that there would not be a sign, when it came:

Out below him to the east in a dry lake bed the wind swirled and picked up a column of dust and carried it heavenward, carried it to the spirits, carried his wishes high and away, as high and away as the hawk, as
the dust, and he knew it would be all right. Would be perfect.

He painted the pony with one circle around one eye so that it could see well if they had to run at night and put tobacco on its hooves to make them fast, to show the spirits where he needed help.

Each arrow he placed tobacco on, using tobacco from a round metal tin that Magpie had found in an old shed at the Quaker school when the two of them had gone to the school to learn how it was to be white. They learned nothing except some symbols on a black stone written with a piece of white dirt; symbols that meant their names in white man’s words that the Quaker lady taught them which did them no good because nobody else could read them. But Magpie found the round tin with the lid in the shed so it was not all for nothing.

He did not have a gun. Some of the men had guns and all the soldiers had guns but he did not have a gun and would have to use the bow and the arrows and when he had put tobacco on each arrow he did the same for the bow, each time asking for the dust spirits to make them fly, make them shoot in the proper manner.

All afternoon he prepared himself and when the men sat that night and talked of the raid outside one of the huts he stood to the rear and listened. He thought for a moment that Magpie had been teasing him because two of the men looked at him. But when they did not tell him to leave he knew that he was to go on the
raid, that Magpie had been telling him the truth, and his heart was full of joy.

It was the first time he had heard them talk of a raid when he was not sneaking and he saw other boys who were still too young hiding round the back of the firelight in the dark and felt pride that he was at last allowed to be with the men. He listened carefully, quietly, with great courtesy and said nothing.

“We will take extra horses in case there is an injury and ride to that place on the river where the land cuts low so the bluebellies cannot see us cross when we go or when we come back,” Sancta said. He was wrinkled and had scars from many battles. There was a line across his forehead which was said to have come from the long knife of a bluebelly who had tried to cut the top of his head off and let the light into his brains.

And the men grunted and nodded and smoked in silence, spitting on the fire from time to time.

“We will stay tight in together until we get to that place below the cut on the river where the Mexican ranchers keep that big herd of horses for selling to the bluebellies.”

More grunts and nods.

“There we will leave Coyote Runs with the extra horses and hit the herd and take as many horses as we can get running.”

Now there were open exclamations and Coyote Runs felt a thrill of pride that he had been named by
name as going on the raid. He turned to see if any of the hiding boys had heard but he could not see their faces, just shapes in the brush and darkness.

It did not matter, he thought then and thought now as his pony followed the rest of the men and extra horses. All that mattered was that the dust spirits were with him and had heard his request and that he was on the raid.

It would take three days riding out and around to get to the river that the white men used as a boundary and part of another day to ride south to where the Mexicans kept the big herd of horses and then two days to ride back driving the horses ahead of them. Six days, Coyote Runs thought, riding easily.

Six days to test himself and prove he was a man.

Surely there would be many ways for him to be a man in a week.

He used his heels to goad the brown pony up and out of a gully Sancta had led them to; ahead Magpie caught the sun and his long black hair shone like a raven’s wing in the light and Coyote Runs smiled at the beauty of it.

Six whole days, Coyote Runs repeated. Six days to be a man.

“You must come in closer on the flower beds or there is too much for me to use the string on.”

Stoney Romero gave him instructions the way he did all his other talking—his voice like gravel rattling around in a garbage can. He smoked cigarettes which he rolled from tobacco in a small plastic bag he carried because “tailormades” cost too much and he spent most of his time coughing and hacking.

“If the mower gets too close I’ll take out the beds,” Brennan explained. “And then you’ll get chewed out and I’ll get chewed out.”

“Nobody chews me out,” Stoney told him, and it was true. Brennan had never seen anybody speak crossly to the old man. Perhaps because he was scarred across his cheeks. A part-time worker also named Romero had told Brennan
that it was from a knife fight in prison where Romero killed a man, but the part-time worker also told him that Fig Newton cookies could cure baldness, so Brennan nodded. “I’ll work in closer.”

“As I said.”

Stoney turned away and Brennan started the riding mower and began to mow. He liked the work, liked the way the mower worked in rows and cut even, fresh green lines with each round. Stoney had many lawns to mow for the people he called “the rich ones.”

It wasn’t even that they were all rich, although they did some lawns on houses that were huge old estates where there were statues around the pools and steel gates that had to be opened electrically. Many of the lawns belonged to army families who did not make as much money as Stoney. But they were all “the rich ones” to him, said with a sharpness to it that meant he did not respect them, and Brennan was glad for the work.

He needed the money. His mother had told him she couldn’t afford to help him with his school clothes as much as she’d thought she would because she didn’t get a raise she thought she would get. Brennan had tried to get other jobs but he was too young. They didn’t care if he could do the work or not. He was too young.

And Stoney hadn’t even asked about his age.

“Can you mow a lawn?” he’d asked, taking a deep drag on the small brown cigarette and coughing.

“Yes.”

“You’re hired. I will pay you three dollars an hour in cash at the end of each day and if you do not show up for work you are fired.”

And he had been as good as his word. Usually work was almost impossible to find because of the closeness to Mexico—Juárez was right across the river—and the poverty there which sent thousands north each day to find work.

But Stoney had hired him and he’d worked now for almost all of June and July and Stoney had been as good as his word. Each day he paid Brennan in wrinkled bills and quarters and dimes and nickels, exactly the amount for the hours he had worked and each day Brennan went home and put the money in a jar in the cupboard.

It was adding up, the money.

Because I don’t do anything, he thought, moving the mower in closer to the flower beds as instructed, squinting up at the hot sun and the Franklin Mountains that rose above the city—except work and sleep.

He had no really close friends, no girl—just himself. It was strange but he didn’t seem to make connections with other kids. Last year for most of the year he’d been close to a boy named Carl and he guessed Carl had been his best friend. But Carl didn’t run and Brennan did and after a time they just drifted apart and sort of stopped calling each other and that was that.

Some of the jocks wanted him to join the track team, as did the coach, Mr. Townsend. But they ran for the wrong reasons as far as Brennan was concerned. They ran to win, to
be somebody, to get popular, to get girls, to get a letter—not just to run. Brennan ran for the joy of running, and to be with himself, and when he told the coach that, Mr. Townsend had looked at him as if he were crazy.