They stepped aside for them. Hicks put his arm over Marge’s shoulder.
“Caballeros,” he said clasping her tightly, “caballeros, muy formal.”
More people in the roadway between the shacks, all watching them as they walked holding each other.
“Do they like us?” Marge asked. “Do they want us to go away?”
“As long as we’re not the cops,” Hicks said. “Or the ASPCA, they couldn’t care less.”
He stopped for a moment, looked up and down the street and then moved her toward the largest of the several buildings. There were people huddled in the doorway, facing the interior. Hicks moved her between two low broad backs and into a large whitewashed room.
The room was crowded with men; there were no women among them, although a line of small boys sat with black books in their hands along one wall. Some of the men had chairs to sit in, others stood or squatted on the floor. Everyone was facing a raised platform at the far end of the room where a small brown-skinned man in a dark rayon suit read aloud from a book he held in his right hand. Beside him on the platform was a banner strung on a brass flagpole. The banner showed a curled shepherd’s staff and beneath it a haloed Iamb, hoof raised. A sanctified aura of gold cloth surrounded the lamb’s white body.
The man read in a voice which started low in his throat and rose almost to falsetto and then fell again at the conclusion of each phrase. What he read was like verse or the words of a song and he seemed to begin every stanza at a slightly different pitch so that the sound built a tension which coiled farther and farther back on itself without breaking. His voice did not suit him at all.
The men in the room listened with closed eyes.
Next to the platform, closest to the reader of anyone in the room, was a fair-haired boy of about twelve, the only person there beside themselves who was not Mexican. The boy looked up at the speaker with a wide smile, but it was a spectator’s smile, not a communicant’s.
As Marge watched, the boy turned to them, smiled wider in surprise, and rose to pick his way toward them among the crowd.
The attention of the people in the room followed him as he came up to them. Marge imagined that the people there could see the drug on her or sense it.
The boy led them outside into the sun. He was carrying a faded cowboy hat in his hand and when they were outside he jammed it on the back of his head.
“How are you, you little shit?” Hicks asked him.
“Last time I saw you,” the boy said, “you were fishing for steelheads.”
“I was too,” Hicks told Marge. “Where’s your old man?”
“Up the hill.” Hicks looked around him. “I see the folks are here.”
“That’s right,” the boy said. “You’ll be in time for the fiesta.”
They walked to the jeep and Hicks took out the pack and the bag in which he had put his machine gun. He strapped the pack on his back and slung the seabag over his shoulder.
“This is K-jell,” he told Marge. “K-jell, this is Marge.”
She was tired of the boy’s smile; it had something of the formal beatitude of hippie greeting, mindless acceptance soul to soul. It annoyed her to see those things on a child’s face.
“Let’s go see the old man,” Hicks said.
They walked along the dirt road toward the foot of the mountain, past the car skeletons and the tepee to a patch of soil where rows of blackened vegetable leaf withered in the company of thorny weeds and broom. The patch was en closed with chicken wire.
“Christ,” Hicks said, “Sally’s garden.”
“Yes, sir,” Kjell said.
“They strung that wire underneath the whole bed,” Hicks told Marge. “To keep the gophers out.”
Marge nodded wearily.
“Most people poison gophers. But it was the time of peace and love and all that lives is holy.” He turned to the boy. “You remember that time?”
“I don’t know,” Kjell said.
“In the end somebody got drunk — I don’t remember who — and came down here with a shotgun and blasted all the gophers they could find.”
“That was a reaction,” Kjell said. “Because it was so much work putting in the chicken wire.”
A narrow trail led along the foot of the mountain, turning at length into a narrow windless passage between walls of red rock that widened into a pine glade. The deep shade and the smell of the pines in the heat gave promise of rest. They could hear fast water not far away. Beyond the glade was a grassy field with a stand of cottonwood trees beside a stream. The stream had been dammed with blocks of concrete to form a pool, where bubbles rose from an un seen bottom marring the reflected image of the sheer mountain over them.
“You want a bath?” the boy asked. “The creek’s nice and warm right here.”
Hicks was looking at the rock face.
“Where the hell’s the cable lift?”
“He dismantled it,” Kjell said. “Tore it up just the other day.”
“All the way here I been waiting to ride that cable. What the hell possessed him?”
A small black and white quarter horse was nibbling grass among the trees. The boy walked up to it and pulled its head up with the bridle, leading it out of the trees. A length of red cotton cloth trailed from one of its hind feet.
“What have you got on him?” Hicks asked.
The boy swung into the saddle and brushed the horse’s neck.
“I was trying to make a gypsy hobble. He didn’t go for it.”
“You’ll get your teeth kicked out. How come he took the lift down?”
“Well, Gibbs was here last week. He took it down when Gibbs split.”
The good humor drained from Hicks’ face.
“Oh my God,” he said. “Gibbs was here?”
“Yeah,” the boy said, “he was here. Sorry I can’t take you up behind me but the track’s too steep for anybody riding behind.”
“We’ll walk,” Hicks told him.
Kjell kicked the horse’s flank and trotted off up the stream.
Hicks took the canteen from Marge’s carry bag and stooped at the waterside to fill it.
“Gibbs was here,” he told her, “and I missed him.”
“Is that pretty bad?”
“Well, it’s cruel, that’s what it is. It’s ironical.”
It was a three-hour climb to the top and shade was the only comfort. At every rounding turn they sprawled against the rock to take some water and some salt from a zuzu-stand shaker bag. Step over step, Marge followed his tracks upward; by the time they were under the crest she was cramped and weeping.
Around the last bend was another stand of forest, cedar and pine. Under the sound of wind in the trees were strange soft noises — tinklings and faint bells. Whenever Marge turned after a sound, she caught a small flash of un natural color, a glint of bright metal or glass. As they walked she saw that some of the branches hid wind chimes and mirrors, bells of Sarna, painted dolls.
“He’s got all the woods around here done this way,” Hicks told her. “He’s got speakers out here too. And lights.”
“Doesn’t he like trees?”
“Not him. He’s a pioneer.”
The forest ended at a wall made from the mountain’s stone. They followed it up the slope for about a quarter mile until they came to an arched doorway, large enough for a crouching man to walk through. Above the doorway were inscribed the letters A.M.D.G.
A paved stone path led up from the gate, rising to a clearing that was bordered on two sides by the top of the forest. It seemed at first to be the crest of the mountain — but there was higher ground above, a scrub-grown bluff from which a narrow stream descended. The fourth side of the clearing was sheer cliff drop, attended by a barrier of split rails. From the cliff edge one could see the narrow valley below and the lower ridge across it, beyond that another ridge and another beyond that. At a great distance, the ghostly frost of a snow peak seemed suspended from the clear sky.