TWO
From the railroad station, Milagro appeared imprisoned by dirty hills, their tops spiked with washed-out green bushes.
Mrs. Roger Bannon was not impressed. She stood in the dusty, packed-clay yard beside the station. Her gaze went first to the hills, then to the plaster peeling in scabrous patches from adobe walls, then to the dark-skinned people. The people bothered her. She felt that they were staring at her, but she could not catch an eye turned her way.
This is the absolute end of the world, she thought.
Mrs. Bannon was a petite woman, red-haired, with a rose petal translucence to her skin. A light blue suit, its simplicity and fit attesting a three-figure price tag, accented her smallness. The red hair was caught in a silver-grey scarf. Her eyes were green, quick moving, cynical.
She was thirty-six, and looked ten years younger.
At her left and slightly behind stood a red-haired boy, a twelve-year-old whose stance suggested an adult. He wore a casual tweed suit, white shirt, green tie. A leather camera bag hung from one shoulder. An expensive German miniature camera was suspended from his neck on a black cord. His eyes were green like his mother’s but everyone who knew Roger Bannon felt something akin to shock that a child’s face could be such a die-cast copy of the father.
The boy cleared his throat. “What a dump!” he said.
She had been thinking the same thing, and it startled her to hear the thought voiced.
“There probably isn’t a decent hotel in a hundred miles,” she said. She took a deep breath, and the ripe odor of Milagro bit into her nostrils: burro dung, rotting fruit, carrion. The corner of the station at their left was used as a urinal by men returning in the night from the cantina-whorehouse across the tracks. The acrid urine odor dominated all the other smells.
“Will we get to the ranch today?” asked the boy.
She spoke sharply: “David, must you ask stupid questions?”
He shrugged, turned his attention to the pattern of sunlight and shadows on the station wall. Her mood was a familiar one. Silence was the best way to meet it.
One of her feet began to tap out a nervous rhythm on the dusty clay. The stationmaster had said it would be “un momento” while he obtained a horse cart for themselves and luggage. At least she thought he’d said “horse cart.” The phrase book in her handbag wasn’t much help.
I made three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars before taxes last year, she thought. My latest record will sell a quarter of a million copies at least. I open in Las Vegas on the twenty-first of October. I’ll make two movies next year.
What in Christ’s name am I—Monti Lee Bannon—doing in this jerkwater village?
Her foot continued its nervous tapping.
“That guy’s been gone ten minutes,” said David.
“I can tell time!” she snapped.
“What’d he say he was going to get?”
“A horse cart or something I think.”
“Don’t you know? I thought you could talk Spanish.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, David! Just because I sing a few lyrics in …”
“I was just asking.”
She took a deep breath, opened her handbag, withdrew a pair of dark glasses, put them on. Her hands trembled.
“Here comes something,” said David.
A black Victoria pulled by a sway-backed brown horse creaked around the corner. The stationmaster was one of the two figures on the raised seat. The driver was a wizened Indian in a black and white serape, blue shirt and blue trousers. He was barefooted. A straw sombrero shaded black marble eyes.
Mrs. Bannon glanced at him, took in the Victoria.
“Well, just in time for the coronation,” she said.
***