Harley squatted down beside Tayo. He traced little figures in the dirt by his feet. Tayo closed his eyes and leaned back against the bottom of the tree; he flexed his feet out in front of him. They were quiet for a while. The wind was getting stronger; it made a whirling sound as it came around the southwest corner of the ranch house. A piece of old tin on the roof of the shed began to rattle. Tayo felt as if he could sleep, and maybe make up for the bad night before. There was a peaceful silence beneath the sounds of the wind; it was a silence with no trace of people. It was the silence of hard dry clay and old juniper wood bleached white.
But Harley was restless; Tayo could feel it. Harley kept wiping away the outlines he drew in the dirt and starting over again, angry that he couldn’t draw them the way he wanted them. Tayo brought his knees up in front of him and concentrated on staying awake. Harley grinned at him.
“We got it easy, huh? All the livestock down at Montaño and nothing for us war heroes to do but lay around and sleep all day.” He reached over and poked Tayo gently in the ribs when he said “war heroes.”
“I tried to go down there and help out, you know, when they first decided to move all the cattle and sheep down there. That was when you were still sick.” Harley shook his head. “Really, man, I tried to help. I told my old man, ‘Hey, let me do it. I promise I won’t mess up. Honest.’” Harley was drawing an intricate pattern in the dirt, moving his forefinger without pausing then.
“But you know what happened, so they don’t want me down there any more. They told me I could look after the ranch out here. Like you.” Harley looked up quickly to see Tayo’s face.
“You know what I mean, Tayo,” he said quickly, “you were really sick when you got back, and there isn’t a damn thing wrong with me.”
Tayo nodded, but he was thinking about what happened while Harley was at the Montaño herding sheep, and he wasn’t sure if Harley was right.
The Montaño had not been as hard hit by the drought, so people with cattle and sheep moved them from areas of the reservation which had no grass or water to the Montaño, where they would keep them until the rains came, or for as long as the grass held out. Harley had gone to herd sheep for his family. They pitched a small square camp tent for him and brought him supplies and fresh things to eat every two or three days. He had a sheep dog to help him and a horse to ride all day long behind the grazing animals. His family was happy that he wanted to do this, because it had taken Harley a while to settle down after he got home from the war. He had done a lot of drinking and raising hell with Emo and some of the other veterans.
But after a week down there, Harley left the sheep grazing, with only the sheep dog to watch them, and he rode the horse over to the highway. When they found the horse, it was still standing there, tied to the fence, only somebody had come along and stolen the saddle off it. Harley was gone, and a couple of days later he wrote from the jail in Los Lunas. By the time they got down to the Montaño, the sheep were scattered all over the hills. At the camp they found the sheep dog dead, killed and torn to pieces by the wild animals that had killed thirty head of sheep.
“It was too bad about the dog and those sheep,” Tayo said.
But Harley laughed; he shook his head and laughed very loudly. “They weren’t worth anything anyway. So skinny and tough the coyotes had to kill half of them just to make one meal.” He laughed again.
Tayo felt something stir along his spine; there was something in Harley’s laugh he had never heard before. Somehow Harley didn’t seem to feel anything at all, and he masked it with smart talk and laughter. Harley stood up then, but Tayo couldn’t tell if it was because he didn’t want to talk about the sheep or if he was only getting stiff from squatting so long.
“I’d give just about anything for a cold beer,” he said, looking around the place, at the house, the shed, and the corrals.
“They didn’t leave you the truck, did they? I don’t even see Josiah’s wagon.”
“It’s under the shed by the corral. But there’s nothing to pull it anyway.”
“What about that gray mule?”
“It’s blind.”
“Boy, they sure fixed you up good. I guess they don’t want you wandering around either.”
Tayo knew he was referring to that time at the Dixie Tavern when he had almost killed Emo. They were even now. Tayo had asked about the sheep that were killed while Harley was gone, and Harley brought up the fight.
“I wanted to be alone. This is a good place for it.”
“Yeah, well not me. My old lady got out her Phillips 66 road map, and she looked at it all night until she found the place on the reservation that was the farthest away from any bars. I might be there right now, living on top of some mesa, if my father hadn’t talked her into sending me to the ranch.” Harley looked toward the southwest, in the direction of the ranch. “Shit, I think it is the farthest place anyway.”
Tayo shrugged his shoulders. They were twenty-five or thirty miles from the bars on the other side of the reservation boundary line. People called it “going up the line,” and the bars were built one after the other alongside 66, beginning at Budville and extending six or seven miles past San Fidel to the Whiting Brothers’ station near McCartys.
“They can’t stop me, so I don’t know why they even try. Like the time they left me out there and they forgot to drain the gas out of the tractor. I hot-wired it and drove it all the way to San Fidel. I could have gotten back too, but I ran out of gas near Paraje.” Harley laughed. His eyes were shining. It had been a victory for him; he had outsmarted all of them — his parents, his older brothers, everyone who worked to keep him away from beer and out of trouble.
“But this is the first time I’ve ridden a burro up the line, Tayo, and”—he paused to rub his ass—“I think it will be the last time.” He walked over and kicked the sole of Tayo’s boot. “Come on. Get up. Don’t die here under this tree. Let’s go, man.”
Tayo shook his head and threw his arms up in front of him, pretending to push the idea away.
“Hey, come on. We can set some kind of world’s record — you know, longest donkey ride ever made for a cold beer or something like that. An Indian world’s record.” When Harley talked like that, things that had happened, the dead sheep, the bar fight, even jail — all seemed very remote. Harley held out his hand, and Tayo grabbed hold of it; he pulled himself to his feet.
Tayo went inside to get his wallet. When he came out, he saw Harley by the windmill; the wind had blown the brim of his hat against his forehead, but he had the gray mule and he was pulling the bridle over the long gray ears.
The mule was getting bony; its hip bones looked sharp enough to push through the gray hide, the way bones tear through a carcass. Drought years shrank the hide tighter to the bones; ewes dropped weak lambs and cows had no calves in the spring. If it didn’t start raining soon, all the livestock would have to be sold, like in the thirties, when buyers came from Albuquerque and Gallup and bought the cattle and sheep for almost nothing. But selling was better than watching them die when the grass was gone and there was no more cactus to burn for them. Emo liked to point to the restless dusty wind and the cloudless skies, to the bony horses chewing on fence posts beside the highway; Emo liked to say, “Look what is here for us. Look. Here’s the Indians’ mother earth! Old dried-up thing!” Tayo’s anger made his hands shake. Emo was wrong. All wrong.
The wind whipped the mule’s thin tail between its hind legs as Harley gave the reins to Tayo. “Don’t you have a saddle?” Harley asked. Tayo shook his head. “How about an old saddle blanket? That mule’s backbone will strike you in a vital place.” They laughed, and Harley disappeared inside the old garage, and Tayo could hear noise of empty tubs, oil cans, and links of chain moved around; Harley came out shaking the dust from four gunny sacks, letting the wind pull at them like kites. He was grinning. Tayo stood watching all this time, and except for smiling or laughing or speaking when Harley spoke to him, he wasn’t doing anything. He was standing with the wind at his back, like that mule, and he felt he could stand there indefinitely, maybe forever, like a fence post or a tree. It took a great deal of energy to be a human being, and the more the wind blew and the sun moved southwest, the less energy Tayo had. Harley was patient; he stood by the mule’s head while Tayo jumped belly first onto the mule’s back and swung a leg over; Harley held the gunny sacks in place until Tayo was on. Tayo felt like a little kid; he felt eight again, and Josiah was boosting him onto the back of Siow’s pinto.