He didn’t know how to answer Felix’s question. So, he shrugged and said, “The village is the same as always, Felix. But maybe you shouldn’t hear so much all at once. You should take it easy for a while and get strong. Soon things will be as they were.”
“I don’t know, Flavio,” Felix said. “I think the fire could be a big problem.”
Flavio grunted and jerked his head back. “Qué fire, hombre? There’s no fire.”
“No?” Felix said. “Maybe you’re right, but I have a bad feeling that already the mountains are full of smoke.”
Flavio stared at Felix for a moment. Then he took his arm from around Felix’s shoulder. Suddenly, he felt exhausted and empty. He had spent the morning tricking himself into believing that if you went backward in life everything would be the same. Half of what Felix had said was crazy, and here he was, calmly listening to talk of pots and fires as if these were things he heard every day. Who knew what Felix had gone through in the eight years of sitting hunched over in the café. Flavio pushed himself to the edge of the sofa and stood up.
“I guess we should go now, Felix,” he said.
“I don’t blame you for not believing me, Flavio,” Felix said. He was staring past Flavio though his head drooped so low that his face almost touched his knees.
The door creaked in the breeze, and Flavio felt a vague disquiet come over him. Hanging on the wall above the sofa were two of Ramona’s paintings. One was of a washed-out arroyo, a trail of muddy water running past bone-white rocks. The other was a picture of three horses standing so still in the rain that they seemed dead. Flavio thought Felix looked more like one of Ramona’s pictures than anything else, and one that she probably would have enjoyed painting.
“Go outside and look for me, Flavio,” Felix said. “Let me rest for a little while.”
Flavio stood looking at Felix as he grew quiet. Then, he turned and walked across the room to the open door.
Even with the wind doing nothing but blowing heat around, Flavio felt better as soon as he stepped outside. He took the steps down off the porch and walked across Ramona’s yard. His pickup was parked in the shade beneath the cottonwoods, and he nodded at it as he passed by. He walked into the middle of the dirt road where he was nearly run over by Sippy Valdéz, who was driving too fast.
Sippy hit the brakes hard, and the truck pulled to the right and bounced to a stop. The cloud of dust that had followed Sippy down the road got caught in the wind and blew off toward the foothills. Sippy stuck his head out the window. “Cuidado, Flavio,” he said. “I’m glad I didn’t run you over.”
“No,” Flavio said. “I should watch where I’m going.” He glanced at Sippy and then looked away. Half of Sippy’s face was stained red from a birthmark, and as his eyes were too light in color and slightly crossed, it was difficult to talk to him without looking somewhere else. Sippy lived just up the road from Ramona’s in a double-wide trailer. It was rumored that he made his living selling drugs around Guadalupe and down in Las Sombras.
Sippy and a number of others from the village had been dragged from their homes a few years ago when the state police, one helicopter, and thirty other cars that bore no markings came quietly into Guadalupe one morning before dawn. Flavio had been irrigating his own field that day, and he’d seen the helicopter flying low over the valley and the caravan of cars stopping, seemingly at random, at people’s homes. At first, he’d thought it was an invasion, but he had no idea by whom, let alone why. He had stood in his field with his shovel and watched as they’d pulled into Celina Mondragon’s drive and taken her away in handcuffs. Her four children, none older than twelve, were crying in the open doorway, and Celina had yelled back at them to call their grandma and not to worry. Then she had been shoved in the backseat of a car, and in a few seconds they had all driven off.
Later, Flavio had heard it all had to do with drugs, and though some in the village were glad the problem had been dealt with, others wondered if things were done this way in other places. But since Sippy and Celina and everyone else taken away that morning all returned a few days later, the controversy soon died down and the village forgot about it as if what had happened hadn’t.
Sippy was smiling a little. His arm was hanging out the cab window and his fingers tapped on the outside of the door. “What are you doing in the middle of the road, Flavio?”
Flavio took off his hat and then shoved it back on. “I’m looking for a fire,” he said, and he looked up at the hills. All he could see was what he had seen for months, mountains that were dusty and faded and too dry. He shook his head. “I thought the mountains were on fire. Pero, don’t even ask me why. Where are you going so fast, anyway?”
“Didn’t you hear?” Sippy said. “My Tío Petrolino died a couple days ago. The funeral’s this morning.”
“No,” Flavio breathed out, and he walked over to the side of the truck. “I didn’t know that.”
Petrolino Valdéz had been a few years younger than Flavio, and though the two had never been friends, they had known each other all their lives. Ever since Petrolino was a young boy, he had walked up and down the highway picking up things that other people threw away. He would carry two large burlap bags and walk the length of the valley in both directions. His house, which was small and dark, was cluttered with crushed aluminum cans, glass colored by the sun, various car parts and bottle-cap sculptures, and other things he had thought valuable. He was someone everyone saw each day and had for so long that Flavio couldn’t imagine not seeing Petrolino stooped over on the side of the road.
Flavio let out another long breath of air. “Petrolino’s dead,” he said. “I didn’t even notice.”
“It’s hard to miss something when you see it every day,” Sippy said. “But don’t feel too bad, Flavio. Ever since those cows, I think he’d been in a lot of pain.”
One morning, just before dawn, Petrolino had been found in the ditch beside the road buried beneath two cows. All that could be seen of him was the little hat he always wore and one of his feet. Ray Pacheco, who had been the Guadalupe police officer back then, said that one of those trucks that hauled hay had plowed into some cows and thrown them on top of Petrolino. But after he’d been uncovered, Petrolino said there had been no truck. He said that God had dropped them for him to find and it was only his own bad luck that they’d fallen on his head.
“Everyone thought he was dead,” Flavio said.
“And that was one of my tío’s better days,” Sippy said. “We ate hamburger for a long time.” He pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and when he lowered his eyes to light it, Flavio glanced at his face. The birthmark ran halfway across his lips before fading away and down through one eyebrow to the bridge of his nose. Flavio remembered Sippy as a small boy who had few friends and who would often walk with his tío and help him carry what he had found.
“I’m sorry about Petrolino,” Flavio said.
“Yeah,” Sippy said and blew a lungful of smoke out of the cab. “Well, he got old and he never was an easy man to be with. I better get going, Flavio. They’re waiting on me at the church. I hope you find your fire.” Then he looked past Flavio at the hills. “Or maybe not. I can’t remember the last time it rained.” He slapped the side of the door with his hand. “Come by the house later,” he said, “and have a few beers.” Then he shoved the truck into gear and drove off.
Flavio stood in the road and watched as Sippy drove to the stop sign and then turned right onto the highway. The breeze tugged at his cap, and he pulled it down lower on his forehead. He had left Ramona’s house halfheartedly to look for Felix’s fire, but what he had found was one more viejo who had died. At one time, he had thought that one’s death and the life one had led would hold some importance, but it seemed to him now that what death meant wasn’t much more than a curtain moving in a draft or a reason for others to drink a few beers. He watched the dust from Sippy’s truck twist away from the road.