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 side.
South Boy cried, “Oh, no, she isn’t dead. Truly. She went away for doctoring by the ocean.” South Boy’s mother had gone to Los Angeles for an operation eight months before. “She was cured, but the doctor said she must stay there until the hot weather breaks. You will see her back here by the second full moon from now, or thereabouts.”
Whereupon the old man laughed in great relief and wiped his eyes with his dirty sleeve. He pointed to South Boy’s mud-smeared hair. “Then that means nothing,” he said.
“Nothing,” said South Boy, thinking sullenly, First, the cook, then this old man . . . He added, “My hair has grown lately.”
“Yes,” said Hook-a-row. “Yes, truly. Maybe it grows all-the-way-long and it will be twisted into fifty strands and you will become a Real Person indeed.”
He went away chuckling to himself, and South Boy went on down to the river, not knowing that more seeds of thought had been planted in the back of his mind.
There was a big black-willow that made shade over the water all day long at the spot where he came to the river’s bank. And the river in those days was the old wild river, before any dams had tamed it. It was deep and strong, and its usual color was that of coffee with a spoonful of cream in it; but today it showed a strong tinge of red as it did when there had been big rains far away in the Navajo country causing the Little Colorado to dump a stinking red flood into the big river above the Grand Canyon.
So the river on this day not only was red, but was a foot higher than it had been the day before, and there was an added restlessness to its surge. South Boy heard it talking to him in disquieting tones. He stripped off his clothes, caked with ditch mud that had already dried, dropped them on the bank, and slid into the water.
By and by he crawled up the bank and into the first fork of the big willow, where such breeze as did come off the river cooled his wet skin. Against the sooty gray of the willow bark he made a motionless pattern of golden brown—the color of a new saddle freshly oiled. His back was against the downstream side of the fork, his right knee was braced against the upstream