Francisco looked up, startled out of his religious reverie, and found himself smiling sublimely at his uncle’s approaching friend, as if he were an apparition rather than a gritty cowhand. Sullivan sat down on a tree stump, lighting up a Camel and making like he was just taking a little break and not there to get personal or nothing. So Francisco went back to his work, feeling relaxed about Sullivan’s presence yet asking himself if that feeling was, like the shade of the cedar, too self-indulgent.

Seeing that Francisco was working on a bulto of San Ysidro, Sullivan began an offkey Pueblo song that was dedicated to the saint:

When the Lord punishes us

With a poor harvest,

With your generous coat

You protect us from the rest

Meanwhile, he was giving Francisco a thorough appraisal, with a sly sideways squint. Well, Francisco was no Mr. America, but there was no obvious reason why some lady out there shouldn’t take a fancy to him. Unless of course, something happened to him in Vietnam that nobody wanted to talk about. “Been to any dances lately?” he asked abruptly. Francisco shook his head and did not look up from his work.

“Was a real good one at the Fairgrounds in Albuquerque last week, lots of pretty ladies there,” Sullivan went on.

Francisco stopped for a moment. “Aren’t you married now, Sullivan?” he said, breaking his three-day silence without ceremony.

“Yeah. So?”

“God is going to strike you dead if you commit adultery. You know that, don’t you?” Francisco heard himself say.

“No, you got it wrong, man,” Sullivan said. Sullivan was one of those people—souls, let’s say—whom it would take a whole lot and then some to really bring him down. “If lightning struck my body dead, I’d become a Cloud Spirit, sacred and nurturing to this Earth and to my people. So, I wouldn’t mind that at all,” he informed Francisco, who only stared at him harder.

Both men were silent. Sullivan watched a fly dancing around Francisco’s face, landing on his nose and forehead, nose and forehead, which for some reason Francisco didn’t seem to acknowledge. Sullivan resisted the urge to slap it off. Instead, he took an unnecessarily deep drag from his cigarette, looking kind of Marlboro Man-ish, profound like, or at least trying to look profound, and turned away.

Pedro, whom Sullivan had abandoned in the middle of their task, continued without so much as looking up at Sullivan and Francisco to see how they were getting along on the touchy subject that he surely knew Sullivan had gone over to bring up.