Carmen Boullosa - Texas - The Great Theft

It was a lot of work to wrap the dishes to protect them from the rocking of the barge. They even put them into a basket to carry them in the tug’s cabin. Now all they can do is wait. Shoot!

He gives an order. “Have the Inspector go check out the Old Dock, that’s where Arnoldo went. If there’s trouble, we better deal with it before night falls.”

And he adds, “Arnoldo’s getting too old …”

He knows that forcing him to retire would be condemning him to die. Maybe what he should do is give him a partner who has more experience than those boys. But that won’t be easy either. Anyhow, for the moment he’s got to figure out what’s going on. And find somewhere to store the baskets of fragile crockery. It’s fine porcelain, called “china,” destined for the new hotel in Bagdad, called, fittingly, The Bagdad. He can’t leave the baskets out where anyone can knock them over.

Julito runs to deliver Lopez de Aguada’s orders to Úrsulo, who just awoke (he worked all night and is just getting up now: he slept on the boards of the dock, like an Indian). Úrsulo jumps into his canoe, happy to get back into the water.

The buffalo hunter, Wild, leaves Mrs. Big’s Hotel to take a piss and get some fresh air. Santiago’s body is hanging heavily from the icaco tree, without swinging, like a mangrove root searching for the earth. A black bird lands like a stone on his shoulder. The Rangers sent by the pharmacist at Neals’ suggestion have arrived. The cart laden with the buffalo hunter’s foul-smelling, grim cargo, or “harvest,” stands out against the river. That’s all.

“Where are those idiots?”

He goes back inside to ask Mrs. Big if she knows where Trust and his slaves are. Behind her, Sandy’s cousin answers, “They left a while ago.”

The buffalo hunter Wild pays the bill and makes a deal with Mrs. Big to leave his cart there. “If you wanna leave it here, that’s your choice.” Who’ll look after the animals? “We’ll take care of them for you; it’ll cost …” They come to an agreement (which humiliates Mrs. Big, “That’s what things have come to, I’m just a barn-keeper now”). He mounts a horse; that’s the last they’ll see of him for a long time.

The Inspector is a canoe that belongs to the port authority in Matasánchez. It handles all conditions equally well: wind, high tide, calm waters. Úrsulo paddles; he prefers to take to the water alone but he can carry up to four passengers. Úrsulo has long, straight hair decorated with various ribbons, and he’s wearing a leather shirt, moccasins, and tailored pants. Young men in Matasánchez imitate the way he dresses, but no one dares to copy his hairstyle.

The Río Bravo is being rough with the empty barge, playing with both it and the tug as if they were shells. It has changed. “Even Miss Bravo is angry at those boys! Settle down, girl, what have I done?” Arnoldo says aloud to the river.

It feels like something’s about to happen. Is there a hurricane coming?! That’s the last thing he needs!

Now he can see the dock in Bruneville. There’s no other vessel docked there. He sees the steamboat Elizabeth anchored at a distance from the dock. How strange. Plus, now is the time when the open sea fishermen should be preparing their nets for their next sailing, but there’s no sign of them. All he sees is a group of uniformed men.

“Goddamn town of gunslingers. It’s their fault my boys are gone. Such good boys. I raised them. I fed them for all those years. They were like sons. More than sons.”

He sees something unidentifiable swinging from Mrs. Big’s tree. His eyes aren’t what they used to be. Those two boys were indispensable. He’s all of a sudden quite melancholy — the impotence of old age, the betrayal of the boys.

He just can’t come to terms with what they’ve done to him, and even less with the burden of his age. “They’ve gone and run away from me, and took everything?”

Now that the Bruneville dock is right in front of him, he regrets coming here. He should have gone to Matasánchez, the Captain would have helped him find the kids, but the way the moorings came undone took him by surprise … What is he going to do, all alone with the barge and the tug? He should have gone to the New Dock, there he would have found Julito or someone else to help him. But that’s it. It’s too late.

“I’m an idiot, an idiot. I’m good for nothing these days. It’d be better if the Grim Reaper came for me now. The older I get the more worthless I am …”

He curses because he just can’t believe that his boys, who were so good, his kids … it’s his own fault … some unknown misfortune must have befallen them.

On land, the uniformed men crowd together, discussing how to receive him.

“Now what? What are they up to?”

The barge approaches the dock.

“At least there are enough of them that they can give me a hand. There’s so many of them!”

Putting his self-criticisms aside, Arnoldo tosses the rope he keeps tied to the tiller for emergencies. How long has it been since he used it? By way of an answer, he recalls a woman’s sweet, bitter scent, she was wearing a flowered dress. Her armpits tasted like pineapple, what a delight!

The uniformed men on the dock tie up the rope, fastening the barge to land. They don’t even greet Arnoldo or wait for him to leave the cabin.

One of them cocks his pistol.

He points it at his forehead and fires between his brows, right between the old man’s eyes.

They hang him from another branch of Mrs. Big’s leafy icaco, stringing him up high next to Santiago: “So those outlaw Mexicans learn their lesson.”

Úrsulo’s canoe arrives at the Old Dock in a hop, skip, and a jump, like he and his canoe are one body. He takes the Inspector out of the water and leaves it where he always does (in the fork of a giant kapok tree that keeps it out of sight — he doesn’t know how long it’ll be before he returns).

It wouldn’t take an expert at tracking like Úrsulo to figure out dozens of cattle have been here. And at least twelve horses. One of them is carrying two men: the shoe prints are deep. He recognizes them: the shoes of Don Nepomuceno’s mare, Pinta. Úrsulo was there when she was shod.

“What’s he up to now?”

And it wouldn’t take Úrsulo to figure out they headed to Laguna del Diablo. He returns to the Inspector , he should deliver the news to Matasánchez. He tosses the canoe into the water and boards it skillfully, like an expert rider mounting his horse. He finds the current and uses the oar to avoid a tree trunk the Bravo uprooted, a victim of its moods.

(Úrsulo knows how to hear the tree’s laments, tears that are made of unblossomed flowers, unripened fruit, fallen leaves that will rot; the lament the fallen tree murmurs as it bobs along makes Úrsulo pensive.)

It’s like Úrsulo is one with the Inspector .

The current carries the Inspector straight to the New Dock in Matasánchez.

Úrsulo delivers the news (which is like a cannon ball landing at the Port Chief’s feet, though he hasn’t lit the fuse: he doesn’t mention the fact he recognized Nepomuceno’s mare’s shoe prints). In turn, Lopez de Aguada tells him everything that’s happened in Bruneville in three swift strokes: about Sheriff Shears; Nepomuceno’s gunshot; and that he fled.

“You heard it here first, Úrsulo … this means trouble. You can’t just shoot an American with impunity. It must be Nepomuceno and his men … on the lam …”

“It’s true,” is all Úrsulo says. “A white horse ain’t a horse.”

“God’s truth: a white horse is not a horse,” answers Lopez de Aguada, without fully understanding why Úrsulo has chosen to quote something he’d heard from the Chinese visitor, Chung Sun.