discarded all ideas of doing anything interesting that day and decided he would try reading. So he walked over to the ranch house, got down on his belly, and crawled under the back gallery where the space between the floor and the ground was too limited to admit anyone but himself and the house cat. Back about six or eight feet was a small depression where the cat had her semiannual litter of kittens and South Boy kept his personal cache. Thence he took an old copy of Bob Ingersoll’s lectures that had remained unread since the Mormonhater had loaned it to him in the spring, and slowly backing out into the sunlight and shading his eyes with the book, he returned to his sleeping place under the palm tree.
There he sat with his back against the rough bole of the tree, idly turning the pages. The book didn’t look very interesting. He had only consented to take it home in the first place because of the divergent opinions the Mormonhater and his mother had expressed about Mr. Ingersoll. His mother said he was the Devil’s disciple. The Mormonhater said he was the smartest man ever born.
South Boy had been aiming to find out why for a long time, but until now his days had been too full. Now he tried hard to find out whatever there was great or devilish in the first few lines, but the sweat ran into his eyes and blinded him. The bees, in their desperate attempt to air-condition their breeding chambers, were making too much noise. And without warning South Boy began to be bothered about his hair. It had grown long, or “half-long,” as the Mojaves say, simply because since his mother was gone no one had taken the trouble to say, “Cut the boy’s hair.” As for his part, it was easier to let it grow than to get it cut. He never thought about it until the Mexican woman set the seeds of thinking in the back of his head.
A moment or two of fretful annoyance and he slammed the book down and again ducked out into the glare. I reckon it ain’t too hot to go see Havek, he thought, picturing the airy shade under Havek’s mother’s willow-roof, where he could lie on the dampened, hard-packed adobe floor and gossip and sleep all day with Havek and his various relatives. Maybe by night it would be cool enough to go fishing.
The sun struck him like a ponderous weight and pressed down on him from all sides, but he walked quickly because the hot, white dust burnt through a quarter-inch of callus and stung his feet. The nearest relief was the shade of the west side of the stack of baled hay in the center of the horse corral. He rolled over the willow-pole fence and ran for it, his mouth open and his eyes glazed. Once in the shadow of the stack he squatted on his heels, panting.
There were a dozen saddle horses in a single file, some head to head, some nose to tail, leaning against the stack, for the hay was still several degrees cooler than the air. South Boy felt no inclination to go out into the sun again to find a saddle or bridle, so he kicked through the litter underfoot until he found an old piece of stake rope, and walking up to the nearest animal—she happened to be a dun mare with a brown stripe the length of her back—he had the rope tied around her neck and a half-hitch bent around her nose before she roused out of her daze.
South Boy heaved himself onto her back and clamped fast with his knees, drumming his heels against her fat sides to drive her away from the stack. The mare stood the drumming for a full minute as though she were debating whether it was worth the effort to try to buck him off, and then shook her head. She moved slowly away from the hay, with little steps. She walked past the other horses, so close that South Boy’s nigh leg rubbed hard against several of them, and then out into the killing sun.
Near the end of the half-mile stretch of shadeless trail to the lower irrigation ditch the mare began to stagger. South Boy did his best to keep her on her feet but she fell right by the fringe of small willows at the edge of the ditch. He jumped free, slipped off the hackamore, and stood coiling the rope over his left hand and elbow, staring down at the mare with amazement. “What do you know! She foundered out on me! I ain’t never seen the sun knock out a horse so soon!”
Up to this point he hadn’t noticed any particular ill effects of the sun on himself except the usual discomfort of sweat that poured out and dried in a sticky salt rime all over his body. He did notice he was a little bit dizzy and a little bit frightened. Fortunately the ditch was running bank-full. He promptly dived headlong into it, rolled over, sat up chest-deep in the roily water, fetched up handfuls of cool red mud from the bottom and began plastering it over his head and the back of his neck.
“Good thing my hair is a little bit long,” he said. “Damn sun might have killed me.” He remembered he had been warned that the summer’s sun would kill white people who didn’t wear hats. He never wore a hat five weekdays in his life, so he hadn’t believed it.
He sat thinking. “It’s too far to Havek’s, but it is only a half-mile to the river. The river water runs deep, and it’s cooler than ditch water. I’ll go to the river and stay there until the crazy weather is past.”
He rose to his knees and looked over the bank at the mare. She lay still, her neck stretched out. She looked dead, but South Boy noticed she had fallen craftily, her head in the shade of the willows. He got out of the ditch, raised his left foot over her head and let about a pint of muddy water run out of the leg of his jeans and over her head.
The mare promptly scrambled to her feet; giving South Boy a look of infinite disgust, she bolted into the nearest mesquite without regarding its thorns, and there she stood, with only her defiant rump showing.
“No, I ain’t going to try and dig you out of there,” said South Boy, and he went slowly away toward the west, toward the Colorado Grande, dripping a twisting trail, for he traveled from the lacy shade of one mesquite tree to another for the relief of his feet.
There was a sort of boundary line by the river’s bank where mesquite and gourd vines and soapweed gave way to current-scoured earth and big willows—big enough to have stood against the last high water—and at this place South Boy ran across the old man called Hook-a-row.
Time and heat had shriveled Hook-a-row to much less than the six feet, two hundred pounds that was the size of a Mojave man in his prime. But he still walked upright and struck his long staff at the ground with force and decision. He was a rather disreputable-looking old man. His long gray hair was not twisted into ropes in the Mojave way, but fell in a loose, untidy tangle to his shoulders, and there was a rag bound around his head Apache-fashion. He wore a dirty white man’s suit of ancient cut and a long undershirt that hung outside his pants and almost to his knees. At the same time there was an air of distinction about him that marked him as a man of quality and he showed his good manners in the courteous way he greeted South Boy.
“Friend-of-mine.”
South Boy said, “Old-man-my-uncle,” which is the polite way to greet a man of his age; and he added, “It’s hot,” in English.
“Hot? Hot?” laughed Hook-a-row, as cheerfully as if it had been a spring morning. He put his head a little to one side, like an inquiring bird. He had something else on his mind, for while he appeared to be trying to remember the meaning of the English word his sparsely bearded face lost its cheerfulness and grew sadder and sadder until there were tears brimming in his eyes.
“What’s the matter?” asked South Boy.
“It’s the matter of your half-long hair. There is tears in my eyes because there is sorrow to your left, or so I hear. Nothing was said and nothing was known, or we would have come and cried at the proper time.”
Stupid from the heat and still beset with the recurrent uneasiness that had troubled him since he first awoke, South Boy shuffled his feet and pondered the old man’s meaning. “Half-long hair”: that would be a sign of mourning to a Mojave. The old man was referring to a death with the elaborate circumlocution necessary to avoid giving offense. “To your left”: that meant on South Boy’s mother’s
