Long Night of Winchell Dear

ONE So, my nephew, listen to me and know my words: In the high desert, Time is an old, sly rider, a bandit of legend who will steal your days and take your woman and be smiling down at you as He boards the evening train. And having remembered his uncle's words and having lived with the truth of them all the length of his fifty-one summers, Pablo Espinosa came hard and fast off the ridge of Guapa Mountain in full darkness. Seventy-two miles above the border and slipping on loose stones, clutching the green and swaying branches of pinon pines for balance, he began his descent toward Slater's Draw, where his silhouette would no longer pin him to the sky. Across the dry ground, his brown feet in the rope-and-rubber-tire sandals were taking him north as they had done before, in a relentless shuffle that regarded distance as nothing more than a vocation. Above the sandals were floppy gray and thorn-ripped trousers, and above the trousers a shirt that might have been citron colored once but was faded now, with "Moorman's Lanes, Presidio, Texas" lettered on the back. Yesterday, a helicopter had spotted Pablo Espinosa as he worked his way around Santa Clara Peak, and afterward came the grinding roar of four-wheel-drive Broncos and radio talk he could hear imperfectly in the canyons below him while la migra, the Border Patrol, cut sign for his track. He'd hidden up through the daylight hours and now was trying to recoup his losses. In a hurry and having reason to be, rolling a pebble over his tongue to bring up the last bit of moisture in his mouth, Pablo Espinosa was almost at his journey's end. The pack he carried weighed nearly a third as much as his 140 pounds, the miles and what the pack contained making it seem even heavier. He adjusted the straps, let himself down from a limestone outcropping, and headed toward the draw, the curl and cut of which would take him to quiet and good water, where the signal lamps of evening burned. He hoped only two of the lamps would be lighted, for less or more meant he would have to wait in the darkness before going to the house and the completion of his work. The woman sometimes had visitors and did not want him coming by at those times. That had happened less than two weeks ago on his last run up here, and he was angry with her and said as much. But she had dismissed his annoyance with a wave of her hand and set tortillas and water before him. Five hundred feet below and a third of a mile east of Pablo Espinosa lay the diamondback. It of genus Crotalus and species atrox, on its belly and holding down its own special place in matters of form and function, was a month less than twenty years and an inch beyond seven feet. All day it had lain up under a mesquite tree, waking only twice when cattle grazed by. Now, with the sun well set and Del Norte peaks washed in the paleness of a three-quarter moon on its way to full, the air had cooled sufficiently for it to begin a night hunt. Weighing sixteen pounds on its empty stomach, the diamondback came slowly out of its flat resting coil, and with the earth giving it purchase and converting horizontal curls into forward motion, it began to move across the high desert toward a ranch house. The route took it over short grass and past clumps of cholla cactus, through the loose dirt of a service road, winding, winding. On the other side of the road and fifty feet behind the rancher's house was a tank with a small leak forming a puddle from which the diamondback could suck its water. Nearly across the road and sensing ground vibrations, the snake paused, came to alertness, eyes expressionless and always the same: black, fixed, unblinking. And the tongue flicking rapidly, conveying air particles to the Jacobson's organ in the roof of the mouth and thenceforth into the brain: smell. Its head came up, followed by part of the body and not quite into a full striking coil, holding there. ButWaller, Robert James is the author of 'Long Night of Winchell Dear ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780307209962 and ISBN 0307209962.