The Wallbuilders

Eric, March 2002

The growing heat of the morning sun penetrated the chill desert air of winter and began drawing from his pores the previous night’s tequila. A new day, and this day gave turn a new year. He clamored over the stone wall earning superficial flesh wounds that would swell as he slept, pain the next day, and be gone in a week. He found the dry place where he’d left his pack, and there he collapsed and slept.

When he woke, the sun had warmed the winter air and had already arched into the far Occidental sky. He sat in a small flimsy metal chair at a corroded metal table, one of four in the room, each covered in the chipped and faded bravado of the region’s cerveza cartel. A woman shuffled across the dirt floor of the smoke-filled room with a pot of boiling coffee grounds. The smell alone breathed a tinge of life back into his body. She poured the boiling black liquid from the pot into a brown ceramic mug on the table just in front of him. Heavy aromatic steam rose along his canvas outer-shirt finding his scruff covered neck, where it condensed into a soothing salve that infused his body with warmth, and then it curled past the angle of his jaw and entered his head. He immediately rejoined the world of the living and he thought that this must be the secret passed from generation to generation among this land’s mystical and legendary healers.

He sat by a jagged square hole in the mud-brick wall, one of two windows in the small dark room. Smoke from the wood-fire against the rear wall thickened the air and crept along the low ceilings in search of fresher clime. He rarely enjoyed the simple pleasure of sitting at a window, but the rich rays of the late afternoon sun beamed through the window a hand’s length in front of his face, leaving him sufficiently concealed by the darkness inside. He raised the mug to his lips to test the temperature and his large arm broke the shaft of orange light framed by the window, causing an ominous shadow to pass across the largest pot above the wood-fire, and then across the side of the woman’s face as she bent forward stirring the pot’s contents. She turned to account of the movement. The bitch that had been sleeping in the dirt of the dim corner near the fire rose to her feet, listened for some time, stretched, then walked across the dirt floor to the open doorway. Her silhouette at the door gave him a final disapproving look, then disappeared into the purple twilight of dusk.

The dry dusty air of this silver city ghost town had taken on a mood of nervous tension since the arrival of the stranger three moons prior. The territorial pack dogs withdrew into alleys and shadows as he walked through the streets. The vaqueros and campesinos, men hardened by this land, had given him wide birth in the cantina. The woman in the comedor brought him juevos and frioles and tortillas and salsa and coffee until she was sure his stomach was filled. He spoke rarely, but the presence of his few utterances hung heavy in the air making it clear that he’d brought much more into this sleeping cluster of mud and concrete than just the unknown items in his frayed pack.

He waved off the woman’s attempt to bring him a fourth helping. “Estoy bien Señora. Gracias.”

Then he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a leather pouch and from it he pinched tobacco in a small thin paper and rolled it into a cigarette in one singular and effortless motion. He put it to his lips and from the smoky darkness came the woman’s arm, holding a burning stick from the glowing pile of coals, an offering of fire. He inhaled, the burning paper and tobacco crackled, and he exhaled with deliberation, as if trying to lose some unspoken race with the sun. The smoke curled out of the protective shadow and danced in the final rays of light passing through the window. He won. The sun set and he took two more deep drags, put the cigarette out on the heel of his boot and stood. His bones creaked. He laid one tattered and faded banknote on the table, swallowed the last of the cold bitter coffee grounds, and set the mug on the banknote. It would feed the woman’s family for a week, he thought, maybe two, depending on whether her husband was the kind of man that would send her children to buy grain alcohol with the small fortune, and if he was, depending on whether she was smart enough to keep the family’s blessing to herself.

He lifted his pack onto the aching muscles of his back, ducked through the door, and set into the night streets.

“Muchas gracias Señor!” came a cry from the door of the comedor. Her face was wet with tears. “Hay Dios! Muchas gracias! Muchas gracias!”

“Por nada,” he whispered to himself.

He walked to the edge of town past roofless caved-in buildings and crumbling walls grown with dried grasses and weeds. As he passed the cantina, the men inside smelled his presence and turned slightly to keep a corner of one eye on the crooked, creaking doors that hung between them and the stranger in the street.

He reached the depot and purchased fare on the overnight coach. He leaned against a post and rolled another cigarette and lit it and waited and rested and tried to remember how he’d come to this place and where the merciless wind would carry him next.

***

The coach rolled through the night as the harsh desert terrain undulated alongside, made softer by a luminescent blanket of moonlight. The movement of the coach beat out its own time and rhythm, rocking him in and out of sleep. He drifted between dream worlds, waking from one to gaze out the window into another. Occasionally, in one of the worlds, peoples of a harsh land climbed aboard the coach while others climbed out, slipping into the darkness of barren pueblos, forgotten, barely alive, bathed in the soft mystery of moonlight.

Early that morning, late that night, long before dawn, he stepped down from the coach, weary from the recent tequila nights in the cantina and the dual dreaming of the surreal night aboard the coach. Barely able to stand, he made his way toward the small town in the distance, asleep in its desert-mountain cradle. One boarding house after another was closed or turned him away, until finally, he woke a sleeping watchman and demanded and secured a flat hard surface for his back for the next few hours.

His stomach woke his body and his body woke his mind. He stepped into the cobblestone street, and commanded by the formidable alliance of his nose and stomach, began to wander with purpose. The pueblo bustled with morning commerce. Three pack mules emerged from a narrow passage on his right, burdened with heavy sacks of grain and led by their masters. His legs took up the easy comfortable gait of the beasts, and so it was that he came to walk with them. They passed street vendors, churches, young women clutching swaddled infants to their bosoms, swinging cantina doors, and countless narrow lanes vanishing behind corners into tales of other stories. The sky was blue, a blue that he’d only witnessed in this land, here, above this pueblo.

With the turn of a corner, they became actors in the dramatic fringes of a bustling mercado, and from within drifted many odors and his nose reported to his stomach those which were worthy of taste and consumption. He thanked the beasts and their masters for the walk and entered the mercado, a jungle of fruits, plants, chiles, weavings, clothes, baskets, animal flesh and organs, the smells of fresh vegetables and grilled meats and the stench of rot and waste, bargaining voices, music and song, buzzing flies and straw brooms whisking brown water over concrete. He came to a village within the jungle, a village of food stalls, a secret paradise of smells and women who patted maza into tortillas and fed the workers of this land and wayward travelers fortunate enough to make the discovery. He wanted to dive in and satiate his hunger, but he remembered the legends of doom and the tales of those who had only just escaped such places with their lives, and so caution reigned.

Then he saw her. In a not special stall, behind a counter stacked high with eggs and fruit and vegetables, she stood dipping breaded beef-skirts bigger than both his hands into a vessel of boiling grease. Two small girls tugged at her apron and wailed their childish demands. The woman responded with stern and loving reproach and the whines faded to quiet whimpers of resignation. The brown skin of her arms and hands bore witness to the muscles beneath, proclaiming a life and identity of hard work. She was short, as was her hair, and she was stout and she wore small gold stud earrings and a green apron, but it was her smile that stopped him in his tracks, at her not special stall.

“This is it. She will feed me good food, much food, safe food.”

And she did.

They talked while she cooked and she told him of her life. Thirty five years in this pueblo, born and raised. Fifteen years at this stall. Twelve hours a day, six days a week. Her husband, a stone mason who built walls and worked from sun-up to sun-down. Her girls had not yet entered school and so they spent their days at the mercado with their mother playing with other mercado-girls, darting through secret passage ways to special hidden places in those wild parts of the mercado invisible to the big people, a fantastic world where the imagination of children reigned. Her girls were three years and four. She would work as hard as she must to give them a better life than her own, not that hers had been particularly harsh, but her girls would have more.

“De donde eres?” she asked him.

“Tejas.”

She smiled and spooned a pile of jalapeños on his egg sandwich.

***

He traded for fruit with the vendors in the market, then stepped into the sun-soaked cobblestone street and headed west. The sound and activity of the mercado melted behind him until he arrived at the base of a mountain. He looked up at the long, steep, narrow street in front of him and began his ascent. Half an hour later, searching for breath, he reached the plateau above and turned and gazed out at the pueblo below and the desert beyond. The desert wind swept across the plateau and whispered to him and spoke through him and said, “This is where I’ll make camp.”

He hiked atop the plateau along a river-carved canyon to the north. The expanse ahead opened into cactus-strewn lands that stretched into the distance where they rose again to form another range of mountains. He came upon a lonely hovel of walls and roofs of rock and mud-brick and wood scraps and rusted metal-signs, surrounded by the movement of chickens and pigs and goats. From a crooked and rusted metal pipe in the roof poured smoke of this land’s scrub brush, and outside it mingled with the soft sounds of family coming from within.

He slipped through the cactus and rusted barbed wire and approached the hovel and called out, “Hola? Buenas tardes?”

A small battalion of scarred dogs surrounded him with hunched battle posture, flashing teeth and ferocious war cries. A woman from another time stepped outside, called off the royal guard, and addressed the stranger. Behind her friendly greeting, the bright afternoon sun revealed on her a layer of dust and smoke and sweat, punctuated by her long black and gray braided ponytail. Her apron was a subtle layered collage of faded stains from time immortal and fresh textured smears from the afternoon’s comida. She smiled with her few remaining metal patched teeth, and the worn and weathered forest of wrinkles on her face stretched back toward her ears to reveal radiant light. Then, with much excitement, she spoke. All he could catch was “pase, pase,” but that was enough, so he stooped low and entered the tiny desert shelter on that vast plateau beneath the blue sky of that land.

A young man took his pack and set it in the corner and then pulled out a wooden stool worn to a polish and motioned for him to sit and he did. The old woman returned to her affairs at the wood-fire, and the young man introduced himself and then his young wife and with a sweeping wave of his arm, his little ones, who were scampering in and out and about the tiny room. The stranger counted 3…or 4…or 5. They never stopped moving long enough for him to be sure.

Then an old man, an ancient being, rose from a rickety chair in the dark opposite corner. His movements were slow and stiff and powered with intent. As he stood there in the dirt, he seemed connected to it, part of it, an extension of the earth. Where the floor ended and the old man’s mud-crusted, cracking, dust covered boots began, was hard to discern. Whatever color they had once been, they were now the color and texture of the earth. His jeans too, were approaching the color of the earth, and what little blue that remained had all but faded into memory. His brown patterned flannel was tucked beneath a belt of woven maguey fibers, certainly local. His western cut shirt pocket revealed an open pack of cigarettes, and the shirt’s top two pearl buttons were unfastened, creating a large “v” of gaunt brown skin and a few gray hairs. His hands were black with soil and fire and ash and dried blood. A straw cowboy hat dipped low, covering his eyes.

The old man stepped forward towards the stranger, who rose to his feet, and the old man tipped back his hat and stared up at him and through him and into him for an eternal moment, then broke into a playful toothless grin and chuckled and blessed the stranger far from home.

“Bienvenidos a mi casa. Sientese, sientese. Porfa, sientese.”

The family settled back into their siesta and treated him as one of their own. They told stories and spoke of serious matters and smiled and laughed. The men smoked cigarettes, and more than once, the stranger was the subject of hearty laughter, which he didn’t understand, but joined nonetheless. After some time, the young man took the stranger to a decrepit clap-board structure out back with a straw mat inside and some blankets and motioned for him to unpack and rest.

***

The next morning, he took the southern route down the mountain into town. Hanging from the mountain’s southern slopes were grand homes dressed in the blue of this land’s sky, and the reds and yellows of this land’s cactus fruits and flowers, and shades of orange sunsets across the desert. Moorish domes bubbled forth from rooftops, introduced to the motherland across an ocean of waves and time, and imported to this land during the conquest generations before. Timeless vistas from vast terrazes. Modern coaches guarded by artisan-crafted wrought-iron gates. Flowers draped from window ledges. Ceramic mosaic appointments. The graceful dance of light and shadow in the reliefs of immaculately carved wooden doors. Regal arches and cactus coralles. This was the land of the extrañeros, who came to this place for the sites and sounds and smells and art in the pueblo below, and then constructed their cloisters apart from it all on the slopes above, where the air was fresh and the night wind brought news from distant lands.

At the bottom of the southern route down the mountain, almost to the edge of town, the road snaked through three arches, opening into a green creek basin. Just beyond the third arch, he came upon a crew of workers building a stone wall, two men tall, enclosing a large estate under construction. It was just past daybreak, and the world of these wallbuilders beckoned to him. Engrossed in the early morning drama, he sat on a large boulder across the road and became but a silent observer.

The wall was only the length of a horse out of what looked to eventually be twenty, but already it contrasted brilliantly with neighboring walls. Mesmerizing rhythmic patterns of unevenly placed stones the size of giant desert hares, lashed together by ribbons of stone chips and concrete. In a moment of otherness, the wall came alive as a den of panicked serpents desperately struggling to hold their strangulated prey in position long enough to constrict their next victim and expand their nest as though they were trying to overthrow their original maker by building a structure from which they might defy the forces of evolution, from which they might resist the inevitable encroachment of time, of change, of what must be. Of what will be. Of what is.

Eight was the team. The six oldest drank leche arroz and coffee from steaming styrofoam cups and ate tamales by hand from steaming tin foil. The other two, boys, newly initiated into adolescence, mixed concrete in the street. Soon, after some barking from the elders, two other boys, slightly older, gulped the rest of their breakfast and began to wheel dry concrete mix to the young mixers. Fifteen minutes later, when all had finished their coffee and tamales, these two began shuttling all materials to their needed locations: wet concrete to the stone-layers, raw stones to the stone-cutters, cut stones to the stone-layers, scraps to an infill site. The mixers and the conveyors wore concrete covered tennis shoes, blue-brown sweat pants with gaping holes, t-shirts worn so thin they were see-through, and backwards ballcaps with symbols of faraway dreams. Throughout the morning they strived to keep pace, occasionally earning a break, but usually scrambling to keep up.

Two muchachos cut stones with hammer and chisel. One cut the large stones, not to be perfectly flat, but to perfectly fit its unique resting place in the wall. The other muchacho chipped filler stones into a large wrinkled metal bucket, which would ultimately uncoil from the bucket like a dancing basket-snake from some enchanted land, only to coil once more around the stone prey in the wall. The muchachos wore leather work boots, mudded jeans and unbuttoned western shirts over dirty white undershirts. Their intense focus produced stones perfectly shaped for their unique crypts in the wall.

Next to the wall bent an old man, selecting and lifting stones into their eternal resting place. On the wall above sat a similar old man spreading concrete from a bucket onto the exposed tops of large cut stones, now at rest in the wall, and lining the concrete with a ribbon of stone chips from another bucket. The elders dressed in spotless leather boots, clean earth-colored jeans, pressed western shirts and creme straw western hats. Methodically and expertly, they selected stones for the wall and placed them in their cradles. On occaision, an elder might call the stone cutters to the wall to discuss needed modifications to the stones or stone chips, or, if the stone cutters were lucky, to simply impart a nugget of wisdom from their rich vein of experience. Perched there atop the wall, the elders presided over the ascension of the stones much like St. Peter at the pearly gates.

The stranger watched from his trance for the entire morning as the panicked serpents succeeded in extending their nest to the length of two horses, then he rose from the boulder and continued into town.

***

He spent the day in town, exploring as the shadows emerged from behind corners of belltowers and trees and benches in the plazas, working as he was prone to do, on various projects, each small, but contributing to the whole. At day’s end, night coming on, he stepped into a cantina for a few cervezas before the arduous haul up the mountain to his straw mat.

“Que tal?” to the bartender. “Una michelada, porfa.”

Not two sips into his beer, he found himself engaged in a spirited conversation with the hombre seated next to him at the bar, also far from home, and a character of the highest sort. Steve he was, a competitor, in business and in life. In younger years, he had been a gladiator, waging battle in the celebrated coliseums of the empire to the north. Large and muscled, clean shaven with short cropped hair, silk shirt and smallish, rimless spectacles that personified focus. He had taken success from the ferocious arenas of trade, earning enough victories to have gained his own trading house, and an impressive amount of personal freedom. The kind of man that survives not on blood, but on adrenaline. Living not just on the razor’s edge, but competing to be there. An exotic creature of extreme environ, kin to the spirits of deep-sea, thermal-vent worms and sub-glacial bacteria and tenacious sprigs of green atop the highest wind frozen peaks of the planet. He thrived where most would perish.

He was pure energy, high voltage, could blow up at any minute, and that force animated his presence through wide sweeping arm motions, a fiery grin, leaning in and out of the stranger’s space with authority, and throwing his head and arms and body back exclaiming “dude!,” when special emphasis was needed, which was often.

The stranger had known others with Steve’s unique form of intelligence, born of instinct and fed by competition, a powerful combination. Steve studied heralded thinkers of modern day, not for their thoughts, but to determine if their thoughts merited heraldry, as measured by his own deeply considered philosophies. He recognized on a primal level what most “civilized” persons are unwilling to accept, that the arena of merchants, governed by human “law”, is subject to the higher laws of material reality, and that ultimately, for profits to be collected, something material must physically move, and when certain things or people refuse to move in accordance with majority rule, they must be nudged, either by judicial ruling backed by the barrel of a gun, or by other means.

“Dude,” Steve let out, flailing backwards with head and arms and body, “one guy tried to screw me out of $4 million in a trade once,” leaning forward, back into the stranger’s space with authority. “I played by the ‘rules’ for a while and gave him plenty of time to do the right thing, but he just kept stalling. I guess he thought I was just going to keep playing with him until my money had been chewed to nothing by the attorneys. No way man, I finally had to settle the matter, and I popped his ass right there in the board room, right in front of his attorneys and mine. Ha! They didn’t know what to do!”

“Did you get your money?” asked the stranger.

“Damn right I got my money.”

“Another time,” Steve continued, “I had syndicated investors for a big technology acquisition in Mexico. The Mexican promoter, who I should have been more sure about before investing, breached, and started sandbagging the deal, which I didn’t realize immediately. We were bleeding to death and I couldn’t figure out why. It got so bad, that we just tried to get out, and I started working on a firesale with a syndicate of Mexican investors. Eventually I found out that that bastard had forty percent of the Mexican syndicate. Can you believe that? Once I was sure of it, well, I called him up and let him have it. After that, he disappeared into Mexico City without a trace. I went down there personally and spent three weeks tracking that bastard down, and when I found him, I put the fear of God into him. Not only did I get control of the situation, I made that sonofabitch turn over all his shares. His attorney was furious because he couldn’t figure out why the guy was just signing over his shares.” Steve laughed and sipped his beer. “Without a promoter though, we still had to liquidate to another group, but because we had his shares, we got out whole. Be careful if you ever do business down here. They have a totally different set of ethics, if you want to call it that.”

The conversation turned to adventures in exotic lands, as was inevitable among souls far from home. Steve had done his share of raw traveling to many of the planet’s less hospitable locales.

“Dude,” he remembered, flailing backwards, “I hiked across the Tetons once with a buddy for eleven days. Some hikers were mauled to death by a grizzly the month before on the same trail! You’re only allowed to carry bear mace, but screw that man. We took a .45. Totally illegal, but screw it. You couldn’t wear it in a hip holster because of the backpack, so we strapped it to the back of my buddy’s pack, where I could grab it quick if I had to. We saw two grizzlies on that trip. Thought I was gonna have to use the .45 on one of ‘em. We walked up on a ridge and there was a grizzly about thirty yards ahead standing against a tree. He saw us and dropped to all fours. My buddy dropped to his knees and I grabbed the .45. We stared at the grizzly and he stared at us. Man, my heart was pumping! Finally, after about a minute, it walked down the right side of the ridge. We circled way to the left and found the trail about two miles later. I don’t know if he sensed the gun or what. It was tense dude.”

The gladiator’s views on women were simple and to the point.

“You have two types,” he said, “dirty birds and good girls. Dirty birds can never go back, and you don’t want to screw up the good ones. But when I see what I want, I go for it. I was riding my Harley once going eighty down the Interstate when this fine woman on a Harley wearing a tight black t-shirt passed me going the other way on the other side of the Interstate. Dude, I downshifted, crossed that median and ran her down and told her how good she looked on her Harley.”

“What happened?” asked the stranger.

“She turned out to be a cool lady. We went out a few times but nothing really came of it.”

The stranger and Steve traded stories and philosophies that night over cervezas and the occasional ceremonial shot of tequila. As the late night drew to its conclusion, they were drawn to the cart of a street vendor, seduced by the onion and chile flavored smoke from the grill. The cart was just off the main square, and at that hour, an oasis of highly prized delicacy. A few street dogs circled, drooling, desperately vying for even the smallest scraps that might fall to the street. The lane of colonial buildings to the west framed the full moon as it hung in the clear night sky. Mariachi music from the plaza echoed through the side streets. They ordered taco after taco and ate until they could eat no more.

***

The days passed, and each morning the stranger hiked down the mountain, past the wallbuilders, and into town to conduct his business for the day. Some mornings he stopped for a time to watch the serpents extend their nest, some mornings he just kept walking, but always he traded smiles and a spirited “Buenos dias” with the wallbuilders. One morning he stopped and spoke to them and they became friends and thereafter, each would look forward to seeing the other, and it became a morning ritual. Eventually, he talked with them at length, and always, he wondered how else they might spend the majesty of their souls, were they not building the wall of serpents for the extrañero, had they been born of different blood, of another place. Might they have been something different? Materially wealthy? Artists like so many in the town below? Might the stranger have been building a similar wall in a similar place? What drove them to pour their life’s energy into this wall each day for as long as the sun offered light?

***

The pueblo was subtle. It was at once bustling and tranquil as it spent the days basking in the desert sun. The narrow cobblestone streets were clogged with coaches. The wonderfully aged cathedrals of imported religion bore the sacred symbols of the ancient beliefs of those peoples whose hands actually constructed them. The peaceful plazas were full of older people subsumed in inkprint of the latest dire news of some world and laughing children oblivious to the same. Enveloping it all were Mariachi melodies, Ranchero rhythms, festivals, art galleries and art schools and budding artists hawking their crafts in shaded paseos, restaurants and food carts, cantinas, jardines, mercados, women holding infants, the patting of maza into tortillas and splashing fountains, artisanship, colonial architecture, and crisp blue skies coloring the architecture.

Each evening, the stranger returned up the mountain to the shanty and straw mat, sometimes early enough to bid the wallbuilders good evening, sometimes not. Always though, the rich human activity in town below faded into the faint and distant dreamsong of trumpets, violins, accordions, strumming guitars, singing voices, children’s laughter, and ringing church bells. Always too, upon reaching the high plateau, he bathed in the waning rays of the setting sun across the desert, or the canvas of lights in the town below reflected in the pallet of stars above.

In the hinterlands to the north, he was told of this town’s legendary distinction as the “land of eternal spring.” What the legend failed to include was that this distinction did not apply during the moon following the turn of a new year. Nights during this moon were bitter cold, and they relentlessly seeped into even the smallest cracks of the town below and were wind-driven into everything on the plateau above. The stranger pieced together every shred of cloth from within his frayed pack each night to form a cocoon that might insulate him from the bone creeping chill.

Finally came the night when so much cold air arrived from the north that the insulating integrity of his cocoon resembled that of his rolling papers, exposing his last line of defense, the heat generated from his shivering body. So he put on his boots and rose, fumbled to roll a cigarette with his numb fingers, lit it, and walked into the room with the wood-fire. There he found the old man of the place speaking in low voice with a second old man. The second, while there in the room, seemed to exist simultaneously elsewhere, in places unseen by the eye. His hair was long and black, his face brown and dotted with strange colored symbols and markings, he was dressed in thick leather pants, fur lined boots and a heavy serape, and he was immaculately clean.

“Sientese, sientese,” said the old man of the humble homestead.

“Gracias Señor.”

“Hace mucho frío, eh?”

“Sí, Señor.”

“Sientese. Hagase calor. Eschuche a mi amigo, JuanLuis. Tiene mucho sabiduría.”

“Muy bien. Muchas gracias,” said the stranger to the old man, and then, turning to the second man, with a respectful nod, “Con mucho gusto Señor.”

“Igualmente,” he replied.

The three men sat huddled for hours in the intimate shelter on the bitter, wind-swept plateau, periodically feeding dry branch into the wood-fire to push back the shadows and fend off the cold. The stranger came to learn that the old man with long hair was a healer among his people, and many came to him for the wisdom of the old ways, virtually extinguished, save for the sacred flame guarded by this man and his kind.

They discussed many things, and the wise old man was indeed wise, and all shared of themselves, and each learned from the others. At some point, long after their ceremony had taken them beyond time, the stranger bid them goodnight and returned to his straw mat, and pondered the night’s exchange, and shivered until he finally drifted into dreams of sun-drenched warmth.

***

The stranger rose the next morning after a very short rest, awakened by the crowing roosters in the field, and headed across the plateau to the road down the mountain into town. The morning was brisk and cold and crystal clear, not a cloud in the sky, but when he arrived at the edge of the plateau and looked into the town below, he saw long narrow clouds in the streets, suspended low between the buildings, and while surreal and beautiful, he was perplexed for he had never witnessed such phenomenon.

He passed the wallbuilders as usual, bundled in heavy clothes, sipping their steaming cups of coffee and bid them good day. As he rounded the first corner into town, he stepped into one of the clouds he had seen from the plateau and saw that the water main in the street had ruptured during the cold night, as had many others throughout town, and it surged forth from below the street to mix with the frigid air forming a union of cloud. The condition would reek havoc on the townspeople well into the next day.

He continued on and came upon the blind man he had seen many times, squatting against the same wall, wearing shredded sandals and pants and straw hat, and thankfully a serape, with his hand outstretched, patiently waiting for the universe to provide. He was of middle age and small and heavily wrinkled and without eyes. That is to say, he had no eyes, no eyelids, no eyelashes, no eye sockets, just two deep craters of brown wrinkled skin where one would expect to find orbs of sight and all their accoutrements.

The stranger passed the blind man as he always did on his way to visit the young sisters who worked the tamale cart. As he approached the cart with two huge steaming pots of tamales, he waved to the sisters and they began preparing his usual morning set, three tamales - two chile and one queso.

“Buenos dias Señoritas! Como están?”

“Bien, bien. Y tú?”

“Bien, gracias. Estaba muy frío anoche, verdad?”

“Sí, sí. Muy frío.”

They handed him his usual order of tamales, but instead of handing them money as was the normal ritual, he asked for three more tamales. They giggled and teased him for having so much hunger this morning, saying that it must have been the cold night, and he laughed with them and told them the extra tamales were for a friend. He paid the girls, wished them a good day, and returned to the man with no eyes squatting against the wall.

“Buenos dias Señor. Cómo está?” said the stranger to the squatting figure.

But the man with no eyes just mumbled something the stranger didn’t understand.

The stranger put the tamales in the man’s waiting hand and the man smelled them and opened them, jerking his hand back as the steam scalded, picked his way through the wet vapor and corn husks and began to eat, shoveling with his hands. The stranger squatted next to him and did the same. They said nothing to each other. They simply squatted together against the wall on that brisk morning and ate tamales - two chile and one queso each. When they had finished, the stranger took the tin foil and husks from the man and handed him a napkin which he took back when the man had finished with it. Then the stranger rose from his squatted posture.

“Adios Señor. Buenos suerte,” said the stranger to the man, and the man mumbled something that the stranger didn’t understand.

The stranger walked for a ways, tossed the foil and husks into a trash barrel at the plaza, and went about his day, finishing it as always, with his climb to the plateau, and early enough on this day to bid good evening to the wallbuilders.

***

The weeks went by with the stranger struggling to learn the language of the land, exploring the region, and encountering a throng of characters, and always, the den of serpents lengthened and the wallbuilders built, and the stranger began to pray for them, his new friends of the wall, and always he wondered of that which provided sustenance for their souls, such that they might give the world a wall of serpents, which, once completed, they would no longer be welcome within.

The stranger had learned that the wallbuilders took their comida and siesta at two o’clock each day, so that one day just before two o’clock, he brought four baked chickens, a huge stack of tortillas, salsa and bottles of the sugar water of their habit, and offered it to them. They accepted eagerly and insisted that he take comida and siesta with them. They talked and laughed and all were carefree during the brief respite from the afternoon heat. The air was warm and the creek gurgled below and the wind blew through the trees and the birds and ants went about their business and the wallbuilders and the stranger rested from the heat.

When the siesta ended, they rose to resume work, and one of the elders motioned for the stranger to wait, then the elder went to one of the stone cutters and uncharacteristically directed the entire carving of a single stone, then stepped to the wall and called for one of the conveyors to bring wet concrete. He spread the concrete and then a ribbon of rock chips, and then motioned for the stranger to carry forth the heavy stone and he did. Then he motioned for the stranger to lift the stone and place it in the wall, and he did. The elder situated the stone so that it fit perfectly, looked at it a moment, gave the stranger an approving nod, then let out a shout, and the crew celebrated and laughed and pat the stranger on the back and shook his hand.

Some days hence, late in the day on his return to the shanty, the stranger looked forward to seeing his amigos at the wall, but when he arrived there, the men didn’t notice him. They were circled around a young man with entrepreneur dress from the waist up and the boots and jeans of a laborer from the waist down. This was the foreman, and he held a wad of banknotes in his hand and was counting them out for each of the wallbuilders, and each member of the crew was anxiously awaiting his handful. The stranger watched this scene for a moment, unnoticed for the first time in many weeks, and then continued his climb to the plateau, to the old man and his family, to the straw mat that awaited.

***

For two days the town was cold, enveloped once more in a frigid body of air from the north that brought with it a dark gray blanket of low hanging clouds which erased the sun and blue skies and dropped icy rain and mist that caused all living things to contract slightly. The stranger hibernated in the shack, not stepping foot outside for two nights and days. Finally, late into the second day, he emerged from the shack to a break in the clouds during the low trajectory of the setting sun. The welcome rays filled the stranger with emotion, and when he turned to re-enter the shack, he was overtaken by that emotion, for when he turned his back to the sun, there in the sky, encircling the mountains beyond the shack, were two perfect rings of exquisite color. He embraced them for the divine blessing that they were, and rested peacefully throughout the night.

The next day he walked down the mountain into town for the last time, on his way to the coach station.

“Una cerveza más, para el camino,” he said to himself, “and a real one.” With that, he ducked through the swinging doors of a dark cantina, one of the roughest in town, and ordered a beer.

The crusty cowboy leaning next to him against the bar had a familiar look about him. His skin was light but weathered on his gaunt frame, his boots covered in mud, his jeans straight-legged and stretched, his shirt western, his cowboy hat ringed with dust-coated sweat stains, his grin jovial and missing many teeth but honest and sincere, and beneath his tobacco stained mustache hung a half-smoked cigarette.

“How’s it hangin’?” asked the cowboy.

“Hangin’ pretty good, thanks. Yourself?” returned the stranger.

“Can’t complain…beer’s cold.”

“Yes it is,” and they clinked bottles. “De donde eres?” asked the stranger.

“Mexico man, but my old man was Scottish, which is why I look the way I do.”

“Interesting combination.”

“Yeah…so what parts you from?”

“Tejas.”

“No shit man. I used to live in a trailer outside Austin. You ever been there?”

“Yep.”

“Yeah man, that was back in the Outlaw days.”

“You know any of ‘em?”

“Hell yeah man. I used to write songs with ‘em. I’m a songwriter.”

“You don’t say.”

“Yeah man,” and the crusty cowboy rattled off several songs that the stranger had worn out on a truck stereo in another time. “I’m working on a new one about an illegal alien trying to get back to his spaceship,” and the crusty cowboy recited the chorus, twice. “You get it man? It could mean two different things!”

“Yeah, clever. I like it.”

“Yeah, me too.”

They finished their beers, and as the stranger turned to leave, headed toward the daylight of the swinging doors, the crusty weathered cowboy called out, “So what’s your next move man?”

The stranger smiled and stepped into the street, and the swinging doors swung back hard and eventually came to rest, just as they were before.

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