All the Pretty Horses

house.
    I can walk right now.
    The man pursed his lips, studying him.
    Show me you walk.
    He pushed back the sheets and rolled onto his side and stepped down to the floor. He walked up and back. His feet left cold wet tracks on the polished stones that sucked up and vanished like the tale of the world itself. The sweat stood quivering on his forehead.
    You are fortunate boys, he said.
    I dont feel so fortunate.
    Fortunate boys, he said again, and nodded and left.
    He slept and woke. He knew night from day only by the meals. He ate little. Finally they brought him half a roast chicken with rice and two halves of a tinned pear and this he ate slowly, savoring each bite and proposing and rejecting various scenarios that might have occurred in the outer world or be occurring. Or were yet to come. He still thought that he might be taken out into the campo and shot.
    He practiced walking up and down. He polished the underside of the messtray with the sleeve of his shift and standing in the center of the room under the lightbulb he studied the face that peered dimly out of the warped steel like some maimed andraging djinn enconjured there. He peeled away the bandage from his face and inspected the stitches there and felt them with his fingers.
    When next he woke the demandadero had opened the door and stood with a pile of clothes and with his boots. He let them fall in the floor. Sus prendas, he said, and shut the door.
    He stripped out of the shift and washed himself with soap and rag and dried himself with the towel and dressed and pulled on the boots. Someone had washed the blood out of the boots and they were still wet and he tried to take them off again but he could not and he lay on the bunk in his clothes and boots waiting for God knew what.
    Two guards came. They stood at the open door and waited for him. He got up and walked out.
    They went down a corridor and across a small patio and entered another part of the building. They walked down another corridor and the guards tapped at a door and then opened it and one of them motioned for him to enter.
    At a desk sat the commandante who’d been to his cell to see if he could walk.
    You be seated, said the commandante.
    He sat.
    The commandante opened his desk drawer and took out an envelope and handed it across the desk.
    This is you, he said.
    John Grady took the envelope.
    Where’s Rawlins? he said.
    Excuse me?
    Dónde está mi compadre.
    You friend.
    Yes.
    He wait outside.
    Where are we going?
    You going away. You going away to you house.
    When.
    Excuse me?
    Cuándo.
    You going now. I dont want to see you no more.
    The commandante waved his hand. John Grady put one hand on the back of the chair and rose and turned and walked out the door and he and the guards went down the hallway and out through the office to the sallygate where Rawlins stood waiting in a costume much like his own. Five minutes later they were standing in the street outside the tall ironshod wooden doors of the portal.
    There was a bus standing in the street and they climbed laboriously aboard. Women in the seats with their empty hampers and baskets spoke to them softly as they made their way down the aisle.
    I thought you’d died, said Rawlins.
    I thought you had.
    What happened?
    I’ll tell you. Let’s just sit here. Let’s not talk. Let’s just sit here real quiet.
    Are you all right?
    Yeah. I’m all right.
    Rawlins turned and looked out the window. All was gray and still. A few drops of rain had begun to fall in the street. They dropped on the roof of the bus solitary as a bell. Down the street he could see the arched buttresses of the cathedral dome and the minaret of the belltower beyond.
    All my life I had the feelin that trouble was close at hand. Not that I was about to get into it. Just that it was always there.
    Let’s just sit here real quiet, said John Grady.
    They sat watching the rain in the street. The women sat quietly. Outside it was darkening and there was no sun nor any paler place to the sky where sun might be. Two more women climbed aboard and took their seats and then the driver swung up and closed the door and looked to the rear in the mirror and put the bus in gear and they pulled away. Some of the women wiped at the glass with their hands and peered back at the prison standing in the gray rain of Mexico. So like some site ofsiege in an older time, in an older country, where the enemies were all from without.
    It was only a few blocks to the centro and when they