The new guy, the one with the mouth organ who used to hang around with them at that time, didn’t touch Daniel, he stood to one side with his hands in his pockets, he looked around as he left, but he didn’t go back.

  Maria waited till the sons of bitches had moved sufficiently far away, pushed her way between the trucks, and crawled up to Daniel.

  He opened his eyes and sniffed his clothes, touched his head where it had hit the asphalt.

  She watched him and as he didn’t say anything, not even scram, she put his pistol in his hand and lay down beside him.

  It was cold on the ground, but he didn’t say get lost, as he sometimes did.

  He just gazed at the moving clouds and the bright glare of the sun between them. She knew, because she was gazing at them too.

  It was cold on the ground, but still—this time, she could have stayed there till morning.

  Later she made little bombs just for him, for self-defense, they looked like the Albanian sweet-makers’ rum-bombs, two and a half kunas each; but she never got around to giving them to him.

  Whenever he sets off to the cowboys, to his first film job, Angelo, maestro on the mouth organ, doesn’t walk along the road, he takes a roundabout route, through fields and vineyards, then over the railway track, through the undergrowth and tall grass, avoiding the streams overgrown with thorn bushes in which children and asparagus pickers sometimes find the washed and gnawed bones of dead animals and people, left over from several earlier wars that had rumbled through this transitional port of history and geography, somehow incidentally, in passing—leaving behind a lot of waste, desolation, filth, and hysteria. This young man, you will observe from the way he moves, like a highwire dancer, is taking care not to tear his tuxedo, not to dirty his trousers, not to catch himself on a cherry branch as he treads along the dry stone walls that stretch infinitely in four directions.

  When the women picking olives, with their olive eyes and olive skins, catch sight of this freshly shorn head out of an anatomical atlas moving above the bushes, they feel like holding it in their laps or at least passing their open hands over the short haircut—the younger ones put their fingers in their mouths and whistle.

  Malicious people say that Angelo is a gigolo, but he is not a mannequin from a catwalk, a talking dildo, a toy-boy for women tourists, today he is, take a good look—the prince of the flatlands.

  He always keeps to himself, in company he is usually silent unless someone asks him something, but everyone agrees that he has presence, everyone pats him on the back and gladly treats him to a whiskey in the bar of the La Vida Loca restaurant or a beer in the Last Chance.

  He is a serial lover, a troubadour and adornment of the world, a being harmless as a butterfly, a sweet birdbrain with firm limbs, fragrant consolation for any girl who needs it.

  Not intending any good, let alone harm, he used an ice cream spoon to scoop out the hearts of wise virgins, and made the foolish a little more sensible. They opened their wallets, their legs, and their mouths and later accused the young man of having a stopwatch instead of a heart.

  But today it’s different, today he’s the prince of the flatlands as he steps through the fields in his blue tuxedo, he sheds the invisible jewelry that his lovers have hung around his neck, the bangles they clasped round his wrists; the wind has aired the scent of women’s armpits and heavy perfumes from his clothes, cleared away the spit, tears, liquid powder, lubricants with banana extract, and the sourness of vulvas from his skin.

  He’s young enough that it’s still possible for an ordinary morning shower to wash him clean.

  He forgets the exclamations of joy and screams, the contractions of thighs, the hot breath on his neck and the sobbing, the silver and pink vibrators, the brown, pinkish, and blond clitorises, the stickiness of two bodies colliding and the touching battle of women to reach orgasm and “love me, please” and “come on, please” and all in vain.

  He forgets the game as though he had switched off a porn film on the monitor and washed his dick in lavender.

  As soon as he showers, shaves, puts on a clean T-shirt, the women and girls evaporate, with their moaning and weeping, and he finds their tears obnoxious.

  He fantasizes about a great career and a great love.

  That’s why he’s striding along like a cockerel, look at him, full of himself, audacious.

  And now he’s already near the bridge.

  Out of superstition, he never comes this way, unless he has to—it was here that Daniel, Rusty’s brother, threw himself under a train.

  Whenever she goes to the cowboys, Maria doesn’t go across the prairie, over the fields, she scampers around the other way, over the railway track, through the undergrowth, avoiding the streams overgrown with brambles, agaves and the thorns of wild roses in which children sometimes find the bones of dead occupiers.

  She tears her skirt with her fingers if it gets in her way, if it prevents her from stepping over a dry stone wall or jumping a fence.

  She’s not a mountain nymph from one of her pa’s folk poems, but a dragon.

  After she passes under the bridge, from whose concrete vault dirty slime drips as from a wound, she turns to see the rock from which Daniel, Rusty’s late brother, is watching her.

  Her relations called him Cornboy, but she was drawn to him as to a flame.

  At one time, whenever she caught sight of him on the rock, she would quickly arrange her hair, caress her breasts, rub between her legs, purse her lips, and smirk at him.

  Or she would yell at him at the top of her voice.

  Or else she would squat and rock on her heels, her head between her knees.

  Daniel died in his eighteenth year, jumping from that bridge under an express train.

  She had looked for him in vain the whole of the preceding evening and a good part of that day. She found the place in the crushed grass where he had lain, damp with hoarfrost, and traces of the blood that had gushed out of his torn and broken limbs, through his nose and mouth.

  She sat there until some inquisitive railway-track children appeared. Then she took herself off home with Daniel’s school-bag on her shoulder. She had found it in the tunnel under the highway, and now it was hers. It was hers, wasn’t it?

  Mathematics 4; L’Italiano per Lei; a sandwich, which she immediately ate; and a propelling pencil.

  Maria often climbs onto the bridge and looks at the Settlement that is swallowing the golden grass, the olive groves clambering up into the bare hills and the seagulls flying in from the rubbish dump and from the direction of the slaughterhouse; the vineyards sprayed with Bordeaux mixture, poisonous and a childish color, in which dark grapes grow, and dog-rose bushes full of hips and thorns.

  They had run across this railway track countless times. The track was the frontier in times of war, just this place beside the bridge where the St. Andrew’s cross is and trains whistle as they pass. They were short battles; ambush attacks.

  In the times of peace and privilege brought by good weather, together with their enemies, her Iroquois relatives stole bitter cherries in the fields and searched around the pylon for telephone wires that they would use to make bullets for their catapults. Or else they lowered themselves down into the cave, a closed quarry that served as an illegal garbage dump, and there they found foreign newspapers with smooth shiny pages and gala advertisements. That’s how the afternoons usually passed.

  They laid their ears on the tracks and listened to hear whether a train was coming.

  Daniel always stayed longest, until the sirens went, until sparks started to leap on the rails from the train’s brakes.

  The other boys didn’t let Maria onto the track.

  Daniel sometimes told her to get lost, but sometimes let her come near.

  Maria lays her head on the track: on her ear and temple she feels ice or red-hot metal, depending on the season and the time of day.

  This is the time of impending death, soon the plants will wither and the bumblebees and other insects are already turning onto their backs as they fly.

  She listens to the underground shifting beneath the surface of the soil—down there nothing has changed. Under the earth there is abundant life and death: tubers and bulbs turn into humus and a mole scratches under its crisp crust, ants grind grains of red soil into friable granules, and in the deeper layers fat white worms munch the hearts of the dead, an underground stream bursts its way through the clay; in the dense, saturated darkness silver and gold veins explode, minerals crackle, mandrake roots scream, while dead occupiers rearrange their bones.

  Everything that falls onto the earth becomes nourishment, which someone on the underside of the pavement reheats, melts, and sucks up through little straws.

  If you don’t believe this, ask yourself where all those fruits and large or small animal corpses, which no one collects or buries, disappear.

  And if you still don’t believe it—leave a dead dog in a field and in sixty days you will find only a dry tail. That’s why Maria listens and never lies on the earth for long.

  Out of superstition, Angelo never passes underneath the bridge, unless he really has to; he avoids it. Daniel, Rusty’s brother, threw himself under a train there. The boy was a depressive, fuck him, thinks Angelo.

  Since then, many of his former mates with whom he had plundered the high roads the year he returned to the Settlement from America had perished: Ear, Tiny, and the younger Barić. The whole secondary-school gang is now rotting under the black earth. Including Daniel, who had once been part of their team, until they began to chase him through the town.

  He hadn’t known Daniel well, and he doesn’t remember whether they ever exchanged a word. And he doesn’t know why they laid into him, he never asked. They beat up plenty of others, too. Sometimes they’d dream up a reason, sometimes they were just bored. Nothing particular. Mostly boredom. A reason is easily found.

  And if the wolf doesn’t have a cap, the bear clobbers him while the rabbit cheers. If he does have a cap, same thing.

  When Daniel killed himself, everyone said they were sorry. Everyone, apart from Angelo, went to the funeral: Tiny and Ear. Fuck it, the boy was a depressive, they said, which was shitty of them. If he hadn’t killed himself, maybe they would have done it, who knows, Angelo thinks.

  That time when they had run into Daniel in the empty car park and hammered him, he had turned around to check whether Daniel was alive.

  He hadn’t stopped, as he wasn’t crazy; if you weren’t with them, with Tiny and Ear, you’d be the next to be crying, pissed on, in the street. The whole town knew that. Apparently.

  Angelo shakes the doubt from his heart as easily as a puppy shakes off dirty water.

  He’s still young enough for ordinary shower gel to be able to wash him clean and the wind to dry him, he thinks.

  That’s why he sails like a harvest moon, full of himself.

  He doesn’t pause until, from the top, he catches sight of a colorful apparition moving in the distance in the same direction as him.

  At the same time, just a few minutes’ walk away:

  What the hell was that dotard Ned up to now? thought Tod.

  He had been holed up in that chemical toilet for twenty minutes.

  If Tod had had his way, those idiots who had carried out the massacre of the fowl would by now have been in a police car on their way to their idiot village, which like all idiot villages in this world no doubt prides itself on its idiocy.

  But Ned, oh yes, that guy never for an instant forgets that he is Ned Montgomery, man. He had swayed up to the gunslinger from B, like a cowboy, with a cigar in his mouth, and said: “Save the damn bullets, boys.”

  That was how Tod’s teacher, in Gilroy, California, would have confiscated the kids’ water pistols till the end of the lesson, thought Tod.

  And what a spectacular final showdown, man, why this isn’t Hollywood, for God’s sake, give me a break, amigo. Let’s go, finally, finish the job and pick up our check.

  “Hey, Ned, you okay, old man?” Tod knocks on the door of the chemical toilet. “D’you think you could get a bit of a move on?”

  (Swearing from inside.)

  The door opens and Ned comes out, in clean clothes.

  “Surprise,” says Ned.

  “Hee, hee,” he says. “I’m going to shoot in the damn final showdown too,” he says. He takes two golden Colts, of the six he has, out from under his leather coat, real buffalo skin, and spins them on his fingers. An old trick, Ned Montgomery never needed a double.

  I’ve never understood what in hell’s name he needs with those six pistols, man, he’s not Shiva! thinks Tod.

  Hell, Ned, that’s not in the screenplay, he starts to say, but his cigar singes him.

  Mr. Montgomery, that’s not in the screenplay, the Americano director starts to say, but concludes that it’s not advisable and there’s no point in protesting.

  “Let’s go, boys,” says Montgomery, tilting his hat. “Let’s go film! Drag yourselves over to me here, since I’ve dragged my magnificent butt over the ocean to you. It’s time for a real goddamn turbo western party.”

  “Oh, man.”

  We left Angelo sailing like a full moon, above the olive groves and stopping, for a moment, when he catches sight from the hilltop of a figure a bit further off stirring up dust in the same direction as himself. He recognizes Tomi Iroquois’s relation, the one who hisses at him when they meet on the road, so he slows down, letting that crazy woman move as far ahead as possible.

  Today the charmer Angelo believes that he’s happy, because he thinks he’s in love with Rusty, the girl who, at this moment, on the other side of town, is getting onto a train and leaving him.

  But he knows nothing of that, he takes his harmonica, his Pocket Pal, out of his pocket, spreads his palm, and his hand opens into a peacock’s tail while his lips become a starling’s beak. He weaves tunes, a little sweet and a little sad. In his head he is Sugar Blue.

  He dreams about a great career as a musician, and he thinks about an ordinary, true love.

  He believed that love was big and clear, but real and tangible, like a monolith, which is a fairly ignorant notion. Now that he’s inside it, he can see a bit—it’s a moist box containing two blind hungry greedy kittens. There’s no way out and nothing else exists.

  You wanted to tell her things about yourself, sweet Angelo, while you lay naked and completely exposed like really small children, your limbs intertwined in the chilly cellar room.

  But you didn’t, that’s how it turned out, she fell asleep or you fell asleep. In short, you put your snout into her ear and mumbled: “Sleep, Rusty.”

  She’ll be your best friend, your fratella, your favorite lover, you convince yourself, after just a few days, pressed into those few hours of intimate contact—and your wife.

  You really believe that you’re in love with that gangling, rusty girl who is just leaving town, while you, fool, have no clue.

  In that unrepeatable second being counted out by your fast, unaccountable heart, you defy the wind, more boldly than the fleeting Kairos and you believe that you are stronger than everything that has lain in store for you so far. Like—the story is about to take a new direction.

  And it is, but not exactly the way you hope, sweet Angelo.

  Do you not know that it’s your fault your rusty bride has just taken her seat in the train and is leaving you?

  Be careful, because this will be a bad day even for people with better luck.

  They fired, she crumpled.

  She had crept up, stepped out in front of the camera, and yelled: “Now you’re going to pay for your sins!”

  All the actor cowboys stopped with their Airsoft responses in their hands.

  One shouts: “Lily’s back, brother! She liked it.”

  And he fires rata-tat-at-atat in her direction. Some others join him. They laugh. Good joke.

  “Are you crazy?” someone shouts.

  “Scram, out of my sight!” he shouts, from behind the container.

  “Call the police!”

  Maria thinks: those are real rifles and pistols, they’re shooting at her.

  Fucking cretins, fucking cretins, they’re shooting at her.

  She’s cut her lip and her blouse is filthy. She throws two smoke bombs, nimbly, like a real railway-track savage, rolls back, behind the horse’s paddock, aims between the feet of some of the enemies and fires. Her Winchester isn’t a model; her bullets are real. Maria Čarija can hit the eye of a bird in flight, if only she wants to.

  The cowboys all shit themselves, they scamper behind barrels, props, horses, anything. Some fly headfirst into brambles, not caring, running for their lives.

  Fucking cretins, now dare to shoot.

  “Throw down your weapons, in Christ’s name!” shouted the man in the long leather coat she had seen half an hour earlier in the pickup. “All of you!”

  He has stepped into the middle of the flatland with his arms raised—he is standing in the line of fire. He throws down one by one, all six of his golden pistols, so that Maria sees. Beside him, Maria observes, stands a man with a camera, also with his hands up, and that guy who looks like a bearded, bald woman, from the pickup, who showed her his finger. He’s crying.

  Maria holds her rifle against her shoulder, her hand is still. She watches them—through the barrel—as they fill their pants.

  “All put your hands up and come out!” shouts Maria. “Someone’s got to pay for this fuck-up! For my hen!”

  Her eyes are almost stuck together with crusts, her face is dirty and her lip stings. She has only one boot on her foot, and that’s only half on. She drags it after her. No one stirs. And the wind has dropped.

  A crow says: Caw. It flutters to another tree and repeats: Caw.

  Through a curtain of smoke, onto the stage steps Angelo.

  He stops in the middle of it all, not understanding what’s going on. Is this a film? Who’s doing the shooting?

  “What’s this? Is it the film?” asks Angelo.

  In the midst of the silence his voice cracks as though thrown into a well.

 

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