Spiral Read Online Free PDF Page A

here four days, and every night he went outside to walk in the grounds, thinking and smoking cigarettes. When he moved against the weeds, the thistle pods clacked their shriveled seeds like the gourd rattles the Huicholes filled with cockleburs, locked in the purgatory of dry weather. At times he could smell the dust too, hanging in the night air like a moistureless fog churned up by the cars that passed on the poorly paved street beyond the wall. In all his years of traveling, he had come to realize that dust smelled the same the world over. And yet, always, in every place, it reminded him of home.
At this moment, though, he looked out the window to the white light of a clear day. He wore only a pair of khaki pants, which he had rolled almost to his knees. The old house had thick walls and deep window ledges, and on this one sat a jug of water, from which he occasionally wet his hands, and ran his fingers through his black hair until it was damp and pressed back from his forehead. He lay on his side and waited.
Ireno was overdue. He registered that fact. He would like to be able to say he wasn't worried about it. If he were Indian, like Ireno and Rubio, he would have the proper psychology for this, the blank-faced patience for which they were famous, and which the mestizos and criollos attributed to simple-minded passivity. But Bias knew different now. He had worked with Ireno long enough to know the almost Zenlike patience for what it was. Ireno could watch the lanky body of Death walking toward him across a mile of flat, shadeless desert and wait for Him with a serene and steady pulse. It was in the mind, or rather, far back in the place where the mind is not mind, but soul.
Bias listened. Old houses creaked in the hot weather. Only a few minutes earlier Rubio had passed his doorway and told him something was going on outside. He thought of the two of them,
Rubio and Teodoro, peering from the edges of the shades, straining to see, but not be seen. He could feel the intensity of their combined anxieties, like a tangible energy in the silence. Like the heat in the house. He lay on his side and waited, his back to the empty room, to the door that led to the rest of the empty house, to the incident on the street. It was a test he gave himself, to see if he could remain detached. He wondered if someone would come into the room and shoot him in the back of the head.
He heard the boards creaking under the footsteps in the corridor, and someone stopped in the doorway behind him.
"Bias!" Rubio's voice was a harsh whisper. " Es la policia. They are doing something at the gates."
There was a flutter in his chest, and then his heart caught its stride just as he turned over and sat on the edge of the cot.
"What do you mean, 'doing something'?" The old floor was rough under his bare feet.
"Something. I don't know."
Rubio's speech was marked by an occasional muted whistle from a notch in his lower lip where two white teeth—an incisor and a canine—were permanently exposed in the groove of dark flesh. An old knife wound from his youth, his first taste of violence, Bias thought. A bitter pun, for Rubio had indeed consumed more than his share of it since then.
"There are people. Police cars." Rubio was not easily alarmed. He had had far more experience than any of them. He was good on the streets, knew his way around in the barrios of San Antonio as well as Houston. Bias looked into his Indian eyes, and saw the coyote.
"Are they coming in?" He stood and reached back for the Heckler pistol that had been on the window ledge beside the water
jug-
He followed Rubio down the hallway and into another room, bare except for its two cots and two chairs draped with wadded clothes. There were a few wooden packing cases on top of which automatic weapons lay in various stages of disassembly. There were two windows on the street side of the room, and as Bias moved toward one of them a young man stood back to give him his place.
It was Teodoro Anica's