Air and Fire Read Online Free PDF

to.’
    â€˜You’ve been very kind,’ Wilson said. ‘What do I owe you?’
    The doctor raised his hand in front of him, palms outwards, and turned his head away.
    â€˜When you find your gold,’ he said, ‘then perhaps one small, how do you say,’ and he rolled his forefinger against the inside of his thumb and held it up.
    Wilson could just see the sky through the gap. ‘Nugget?’
    â€˜Yes.’ The doctor beamed. ‘Nugget.’
    â€˜You’ve got yourself a deal,’ Wilson said.
    He had reached town a month before, stone-broke and weak as a deadwood fence, his face buried in his mule’s coarse mane, and all his tools hanging off her flanks and chinking like a kitchen in an earthquake. The sun stamped on the back of his neck, his shoulderblades, his hat. When he raised his head he saw two brown trains on the beach, waves rustling against their wheels, and thought he must be tumbling into madness. Then buildings appeared. Workshops, furnaces. A railway line. Smoke climbed from a tall brick chimney. Sawblades poured gold on to a soil floor. He pinched his eyes. A woman was standing on the road, her feet spread wide in the dust, as if she were about to draw a gun on him. That was all he needed.
    â€˜Who are you?’ he asked.
    Her name was Mama Vum Buá.
    She stared at him. ‘You want breakfast?’
    What he wanted was water.
    â€˜No water,’ she said. ‘We got coffee.’
    He took the coffee. You did not argue with Mama Vum Buá.
    She was a Yaqui Indian, from the province of Sonora on the mainland, but sometime during the previous century the pure blood of her family had been corrupted by a renegade Jesuit priest. Her eyes were not brown, as you might have expected. They were a startling cobalt-blue. She was ashamed of the colour – it set her apart from her people, whom she loved– and she found her contempt for anything foreign almost impossible to conceal, especially if it involved religion too. There was an old withered quince tree in the yard behind her restaurant. ‘It was planted by some missionary,’ she would hiss. ‘No wonder it didn’t bear no goddam fruit.’
    Like many Indians in Santa Sofia, she wore copper rings on her fingers and her thumbs: twelve of them – one for every child she had conceived, living and dead. She had strung a handful of bronze Mulege pearls on a length of catgut and fastened it around her neck. She arranged her hair in the traditional Yaqui style, three braids coiled on her head, and she always appeared in the same dress, yellow with red flowers, though it had been washed in salt water so many times that the colours had faded to cream and pink. She chewed quids of some fiery local root that stained her gums and palate red, and when she smiled, which was not often, she always smiled out of the right side of her mouth. Wilson had taken to her instantly, her belligerent manner, the hiss and rumble of her speech. No morning was complete until he had breakfasted at Mama Vum Buá’s place.
    It was almost one by the time he limped into her yard. He laid his crutches on the ground and sat himself down at his usual table in the shade. Three Indians in cloaks stared blankly at his foot. A few minutes passed. At last the Señora emerged from the darkness of her kitchen. She stood in the sunlight, blinking, fists on her hips. When she saw Wilson, she hawked and spat. A rope of red liquid looped through the air towards him, landing in the dust close by.
    â€˜You’re late this morning.’
    â€˜I had an accident – ’
    â€˜You fell off a balcony. I know.’
    â€˜It just collapsed. I didn’t – ’
    â€˜In your underwear. You want eggs?’
    Smiling, he lit the butt of a cigar and aimed the glowing tip at the harbour. ‘They say there’s a church on that ship.’
    She tilted her head sideways, as if listening for hymns or prayers or