“I have to catch a cutting in Santiago.” Joe rose to his feet. “That was your last warning. Good luck.”

Roberto lifted his sunken eyes. “All the same, you were in my dream,” he said.

Joe rode back on a moonlit ridge between canyons. Around was a seascape of ridges, a foam-brightness on the rocks and junipers. He still heard himself speaking, and Oppy’s words coming out: invasion casualties, kamikazes. It was the way he felt, but the words sounded like a formula. To give Roberto credit, he really didn’t talk about the war at all. He just cared about his precious pueblos; the rest of the world could go to hell. In return, Oppy appreciated Indians, as people from a time warp. Sophie was right, Joe thought; he didn’t seem to have his own words. As if there were no words for where he was, which was not Indian, not Oppy, in a no-world, on a high ridge, in the sweet light of the moon.

He came down off the ridge near an irrigation ditch where alfalfa fields, flowered blue, rolled in the night breeze. After putting Crisis in the pasture, he carried saddle and tack to the Hill stable. There was still time to sign out a jeep and get down to Santiago to catch Felix cutting. He’d take a Geiger counter and check some cows as an excuse for the trip.

In the tack room, the saddlebags opened and spilled. Horses shifted in the stalls. He used his lighter. On the floor were boxes of horseshoe nails, bent snaffles, broken reins and two yellow zigzags. Lightning wands. Roberto must have put them in the saddlebags.

His first instinct was to burn them, but he was in a hurry. He stuffed them in his shirt and slipped out the stable door.

He still had the wands when he reached the motor pool. Keys were kept in the ignitions. In the back, he put a Geiger counter. Under a seat, he stowed the wands where he could reach them easily and throw them away on the road to Santiago.

21

Men sat on the top rail of the corral and shouted encouragement to boys in batwing chaps who chased calves in the dark. The cutting and branding was done at this hour because the work bus to the Hill left at dawn.

Two fires were going, one outside the corral for coffee, one inside for Felix Tafoya. The men at the coffee fire juggled mugs and shakers of salt to take Joe’s hand softly and say good morning. Inside, running after a calf, the boys gave Joe a quick glance. He noticed that the largest boy wore a homemade chevron sewed to his sleeve and tucked his bandanna in like an Army tie. Everyone in Santiago had a son or a nephew in the service and Joe knew he was not only a hero to them, but the walking possibility of coming home alive.