“Maybe your horse—”
But her horse hadn’t spoken, she had.
She had gone back again and was letting drops fall through her cupped hands. “Try some,” she offered. “It’s refreshing.”
“I don’t want to drink from the damned thing!” he exclaimed with a resentful cast of his arm toward her. “It’s spooked!”
For him all the peace and joy had gone out of their ride. That was starting in again. That — he didn’t know what to call it — that strangeness.
They were silent for a while after that. She was busy with her thoughts, and he with his. His had to do with her, but somehow he knew, he could have sworn, that hers had nothing to do with him; he had no place in them. What they were he couldn’t think, and almost didn’t want to know. His belly was full enough of this strangeness already. He wanted no more of it just then, if he could help it.
He slumped on the edge of this flat, slablike-stone, his back to her and the brimming concentric circles of the little pool, his hand bent over and weighted down as if by the heaviness of the disregarded cigarette that dangled from it. Though he didn’t look at her to see, he could tell what she was doing, what posture she had fallen into, by her sharply inked shadow on the sun-whitened ground, which fell well forward beyond him. She was sitting at the pool’s edge, with her knees bent upward before her and her arms folded about them. She was not looking down at the pool before her. Her head was tilted upward, almost back, and he knew what she must be looking at to elevate it so. There was only one thing higher, and that would have been the open sky itself, directly overhead. She was looking up at the outlined crest of the mountains — of this mountain, at any rate — just up ahead of them. It seemed very close, now, very easy to attain.
His teeth locked, then shifted over so that the two parts of his jaw were askew, then locked once more. What was this never-ending nostalgia for the unknown and the beyond and the just-over-the-rise? This triangle formed by him and her and the metaphysical, in which he came out a poor third!
He looked at her broodingly, as she lay upon the ground, cut out in black litmus paper. A strange aberration, a momentary optical illusion coursed through his mind and then left it again. There was something aboriginal about the silhouette. Perhaps the arid surroundings, the little pool, the shadows of the two horses in the background had something to do with it. The attitude of patient contemplation, the crouched figure she made suggested a Bedouin huddled waiting at a well in an Old World desert or a Navajo squatting immobile by an Arizona water hole.
Then the impression flitted on its way again; he was getting like her, he told himself.
He got up and went over to the pool and stood looking down at it. It was very small. There was a permanent dimple in the middle of it, and circles kept spreading out from this, never resting, never stopping. He tapped his foot along the margin of it, with a sort of latent animosity, as if to see what it was, what it was doing here, how she had come to know of it. It told nothing. It was nothing; just a finger’s width of water running out of the mountainside, circling a little, then draining off again back where it had come from.
He flung his cigarette down into it. The paper turned gray as it took the water. It went slowly around three times, each time in a wider circle, then found the rill that drained off the pool, escaped through it, and was lost to sight.
He felt like spitting into the water, as one does into an enemy’s face, but he didn’t.
She continued to look upward, only upward.
“Come on,” he said. “It must be nearly eleven. We’ll never get back.”
“We could have gone farther,” she said dreamily. “Do you see that cleft up ahead there? I wonder where that leads to. I bet you can see right through to the other side.”
“Come on. Never mind that now.” He was terse about it.
He mounted, waited long enough to see her gain her feet, then wheeled and started up the shallow saucer-like tilt on the downward side, over which their way back lay.
He glanced back from the top. He dropped on down out of sight, on their homeward way. Then in a moment more, when she should have overtaken him and there was no approaching trot in the wake of his own, he stopped, circled, and went inquiringly back to the top again.
Her horse’s head and her own came up above the ridge simultaneous to his own arrival, but she was on the far side, continuing on up the mountainside, going from him instead of coming toward him. He couldn’t believe his own eyes. “Mitty!” he called hoarsely. “What are you doing?”
At the sound of his voice she suddenly broke into a furious, toiling, upward scamper, her horse’s hoofs spilling little trickles of stone down at every straining fall. The horse wasn’t running away with her, or it would not have chosen that difficult direction. She was the one directing its heroic efforts. He could even see the scissoring effect her knees made gouging into it, from where he was.
He put on a burst of speed, plunged down into shallow trough and up again, and went scrambling up the far side after her, the up-ended ground rattling and sidling as it passed between them like a moving belt.
She took a deal of overtaking. He only overhauled her, finally, by driving his own horse to the uttermost. Even then he had to partly block her off, and reach out and snatch the reins from her hand, to get her to come to a stop. He quickly jumped down and pulled her off after him. She came down in his arms, inert, passive, like a sack, still looking upward to the last toward the goal she had set for herself.
He had to shake her to try to get her to look at him. “What’s the matter with you? I can’t stand any more of this! It’s starting to— Will you look at me? Will you tell me what’s wrong with you?”
She strained away from him even in his very arms, in a stubborn, wordless sort of way.
He couldn’t do anything with her. “Mitty, stop it! Stand still. You’re not well. I’m going to get you out of here. Now come on, I’m taking you back to the finca with me.”
“I want to go. Let me go. I want to go up there. I want to see what’s on the other side.”
“Mitty.” His voice was tightening up.
Her head rolled loosely around on her shoulders, though the eyes remained open. “I want to see the white-haired mother of us all,” he thought he heard her say. “The snow-capped lady is calling to me. I want to see Coatli again.”
Suddenly his open hand had swung in sharply, slapped her on the face.
She fell motionless. He looked down at her. Neither of them said anything. It was the first passage of violence there had ever been between them.
He motioned her to climb up on his horse, braced her, placed her on the forepart of the saddle, and mounted directly behind her. Then he started down with her that way, leading her riderless horse alongside by its bridle.
They didn’t speak. Their heads were very close together all the way back. Their heads never once touched.
Chapter Thirteen
He came out, closing the door of their room quietly after him. He was restless, he couldn’t sleep. She had retired some time before. Whether she was asleep or not he couldn’t tell. Most likely not; he’d detected two studs of glistening brightness set into the dim outline of her face, where it lay motionless on the pillow, as if her eyes were open in the gloom.
He had a strange feeling that he couldn’t remember ever having had before where she was concerned. He hadn’t wanted to stay in the room with her. He wanted to be away from her, for a little, by himself, or more preferably still, with just another man. Someone to talk with for a while, uncomplicated, simple, as he was. One of his own kind. Someone he could feel relaxed with, without having to be on guard every moment, watchful of every sound or sign he made. That sort of feeling.