Winter Rain полностью

Over Jonah’s head the low roof leaked, drops of cold mud smacking the back of his neck as he scooped the refried beans, what he had come to call Mexican strawberries, from the earthen bowl with the crude iron spoon. Across from Jonah sat the Indian, smearing a load of the refritos into a swab of tortilla that Two Sleep stuffed into the side of his mouth. The Shoshone called fewer teeth his own nowadays than he had four and a half years before, beside the red desert country where the two had first met. In their time together he had been forced to let Jonah pull three of them from one side alone. Two yanked from the other. It was crude, hard work with the small field pliers Hook packed along for gun repair: messy, bloody work, and damned painful too. But after a day or so of walking around with a small swab of his shirttail stuffed down in the bloody hole, the Shoshone had never failed to smile again, poking his tongue through the new gap, the glaze of pain finally gone from his eyes, that singular ache of a rotting tooth now nothing but a dimming memory.

Some three years wandering among the Mex had taught Hook what he needed of their simple language, absorbing enough of a smattering of verbs and nouns and idioms that allowed him to learn even more as the seasons turned, ever turned.

Most every day it never failed to amaze him that these dirt-poor people had stayed in this unforgiving country, nailed down in this land of sunburned offerings, blessed with little shade and even less sweet water.

Water—that was the one thing worth more than gold in this country. Most of what the two horsemen and their stock had been forced to drink across the slow whirl of the seasons had been squeezed from the drying, death-laced water holes and muddy seeps they ran across on their travels. And whenever the pair found themselves in a mud-and-wattle settlement like this very one, Jonah had come to count himself fortunate that the milky water proved thin enough to drink. His prayer had been answered long ago: the earth-colored fluid so predominate in this land no longer troubled his bowels the way it had when first they had begun their sojourn into this land of the sun long, long ago.

A long time back he had tried the Mexicans’ beer—thick as syrup but shy on flavor. So still he drank the tequila, the Mexicans’ pulque, as much as he hated it. And here in this cantina, as in practically every jacal where they had stopped across the years, there was little but that fermented juice of the agave to drink, its sour and ropy taste barely softened by the warm, earth-rich water a man used to chase the cactus juice, to mellow the racy sting of the green chiles set before him at every meal, hot as a spoonful of red ants.

The hanging lamps cast a light the color of a dull tropical orange over everything, especially the deep-brown hide stretched over the back of Jonah’s hands busy above his bowl. From the corner table arose a quick spate of muffled laughter as men gambled with a greasy deck of flare-red pasteboards. Smoke from their cigarillos hung in wispy spiders’ veils just below the lamplight.

His nostrils came alive, flaring slightly as Jonah smelled her—even before he actually heard her, before he felt her arm rope loosely over his shoulder. The peculiar odor of these cantina women, ripe with the fragrance of pomegranate and penole meant to mask the stench of unwashed flesh, bean wind, and the previous customer, had long ago become as recognizable as the smell of his own horse. Back came the memory of that first of these dark-skinned whores he had taken in a squalid little settlement they reached in New Mexico, he grown so anxious for her that there in the dark corner of that low-roofed hovel, out of the firelight, Jonah had let her unbutton his canvas britches and tantalize him, stroking his hot and swollen flesh until he exploded in her hand. Like music he had been starved from hearing in so long—the music of a woman’s laughter—the whore had laughed at his eagerness as she led the gringo back to a dark room where she showed him to a chair, worked him once more into readiness with her tongue and lips, then sat down upon him.

Gazing up now at this new one in the flickering light shed by the tallow candle that dripped and sputtered in its pool of heady grease at the center of his table, Jonah discovered his lips and the end of his tongue already gone mushy, numbing from the potent cactus juice. Something in his mind made him wonder if this whore was really as good-looking as the tequila made him think she was. Bending low over him, she tantalized him, brushing his shoulder with one of her breasts, her fingers raking through his long hair as she luringly moved the breast past his cheek before settling in the chair at the corner of Hook’s table.