Perdido. Rick Collignon
now scattered about as if blown. One day he had packed his belongings in his bag and begun walking. He said he had spent his life always moving with others like himself and that, in the end, it had come to nothing. He said he had stopped in Guadalupe because when he first saw the village he thought that it had the feel of having been here forever and would look no different in a hundred years. And also, when he walked down the hill, he could see a small boy in a field running about as if being chased and throwing rocks at cows. Felix, who knew Gilfredo Vigil threw stones at everything from chickens to open windows to his older sisters, thought that if he had seen someone like Gilfredo, it would have been a good reason to keep on walking, not to stop. If it occurred to Felix to ask why Madewell had moved into the house that had once belonged to Antonio Montoya, he never asked. Felix took Madewell’s money and gave him food in return, and they stood outside the café each month as though it were something the two of them had done forever.
Madewell Brown became like a shadow living in the village, someone who had moved into its midst from the outside and then closed himself away. He hauled water from the ditch that ran through the field next to his house, and in the winter, he melted snow. Sometimes he would be seen gathering firewood, branches of piñon and cedar, in the foothills. Those who saw him would think of a wild animal that had grown old and moved slowly, no longer concerned about whether it were seen. But for the most part, he stayed inside his house doing no one knew what.
One morning when Madewell Brown came to Felix’s Café, he carried his canvas bag and was dressed in the same clothes he had worn when he arrived years ago. It was summer, and the sun had not yet risen. The sky was only pale to the east. When Felix saw him, he knew that this man was leaving Guadalupe and that although he had met with him every month for years, he knew almost nothing about him.
For a moment, neither man spoke. Then Felix, a quiet man with little sense of humor, said he had always thought Madewell was too sensible to take a walk on a day that promised to be so hot. Madewell leaned close to Felix and said he had once been the father of six children who had all come to nothing like himself. He knew their names and their faces, but that was all. He told Felix that when he was born, his father, who worked with his hands and his back and died too early, had given him the name he carried so that what he did in life would go well. Then Madewell Brown said he was leaving Guadalupe now because there was no longer anything here for him. He also said he had left something in his house that he wished Felix to see.
Gilfredo Vigil was the last person in Guadalupe to see Madewell Brown. He was in his grandfather’s field irrigating, and he was no longer a young boy but a young man. As he worked the shovel, he watched Madewell walk through the village, up the hill, and out of his sight. Gilfredo thought that this man looked and moved no differently from the first time he had seen him. He could see again how much longer one of Madewell’s arms was than the other and thought that he should drop his shovel and run after him and ask why this was so. But he didn’t. It wasn’t until Gilfredo himself was approaching old age that he woke suddenly one morning with the nigger in his mind and realized that Madewell Brown had spent his life throwing rocks.
After the café closed that day, Felix cleaned the kitchen and wiped the tables. Then he walked up the hill to the house where Madewell had lived. The sun had set, and Felix could feel his shirt, which was moist from the heat in the kitchen, cool against his back. He looked at the house and thought it already felt empty. Felix pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The mud plaster on the walls inside had been painted white, and over that were drawn so many pictures that for a second Felix felt as though the room were crowded. He shut his eyes, and a soft wave of dizziness washed over him. When he opened them again, he began to turn slowly in a circle. All about him were thousands of paintings. They ran from one wall to the other, even across the surface of the door and above the archway that led into another room. They were painted in black, red, yellow, green, and in colors Felix had never seen. In each painting were six children, and from one wall to the next they aged, and as there were so many of these paintings, they seemed to grow old together by the moment.
They were drawn at birth, Telesfor said, lying closely together under one blanket. Their faces were clear and smooth, their eyes wide and surprised. Above them was a black sky with stars and a yellow moon. Felix watched them begin to crawl and then walk clumsily, falling into each other. He saw them in trees and in dry arroyos and in groves of scrub oak, always together, and in a boat on a river that flowed flat and was only water. He saw them kiss each other and wrestle in the dirt and throw rocks at cows and start fires that grew too big. He watched them asleep at dawn and in the rain and in snow without coats or shoes. And at the end, with age, the six of them sat looking out at the person who had drawn them. Felix saw that in this house Madewell Brown had raised his family and that when he left, he left them behind.
It took Telesfor Ruiz a long time to tell this story to Will. By the end, the night had grown dark and Telesfor’s voice sounded like air. Will asked him if he had ever seen the paintings and where in Guadalupe this house was. Telesfor answered that he had seen them just once, but he had never gone back because the sight of them alone in the house made him too sad. He told Will that the house Madewell Brown had lived in was no longer standing. A few years after Madewell left, Horacio Medina bought the land for back taxes. Not long after that, he sold it to the mine, which tore the house down. All that remained now were some old fenceposts and broken glass and pieces of adobe with paint.
One
ONE WINTER, WILL Sawyer found buried in his wall the carved figure of a Lady. He found her by accident. He was driving a nail into the adobe wall beside the kitchen stove when the head of the hammer broke through the thin layer of mud into air. The hole she stood in was not much larger than she, narrow and a little over a foot high. She was coated with dust and mud and woven with spiderwebs as if tied in place. Her hands came together at her chest; her eyes looked straight ahead. Her mouth was full and without a smile. The base she stood upon was a piece of flat cottonwood. Much of the paint on her gown and on the robe that fell from her head to her feet had peeled away. Will didn’t know who had hidden her in the wall, only that she had stood there for a long time.
He never told anyone about her, not Felipe, not even Lisa, and on days like this one he would take her from her hiding place and stand her on the kitchen table. They would stay there together without talking, or at least she wouldn’t, and look out the open door. Today, all they could see was rain and the clouds hanging low on the foothills.
Will had left early that morning with Felipe, an hour or so before dawn, rain falling so softly that they both thought it wouldn’t keep up much past sunrise. Felipe drove, their tools in the box in the bed of the pickup, the ladders vibrating on the rack above the cab. The radio was tuned to a Spanish station, and the reception was so poor that to Will it sounded as though the voices came from another world.
They drove through Guadalupe, heading north. Most of the houses were still dark, and this early there wasn’t even a sign of life in Felix’s Café. The narrow, two-lane highway was empty except for the occasional trucker hauling hay and dragging clouds of vapor in his wake. The rain seemed to be falling harder.
“This might be a bad idea,” Felipe said.
Will leaned forward and wiped the fog off the windshield. “How can you even see?” he said. “Maybe if you put on the wipers, we won’t hit a cow.” Felipe grunted and hit the switch, and the wipers clacked back and forth. “All we got to do,” Will went on, “is get some measurements.”
“This was your stupid idea to take a job so far away.”
“It won’t take long,” Will said. “We’ll give her a price and come home.”
“It’s a five-hour drive,” Felipe said. “Besides, who’s going to crawl around her roof in the rain?”
“You think it’ll rain all day?”
“It rained all night,” Felipe said, as if that had something to do with now. “Even if it doesn’t, the roof’ll be slick.”