Chapter 7
LUCKILY, I WAS closer to the door.
“Hey! Uh, do you know ángel?” I stammered as I stepped between Caballo and his only way out. “The teacher at the Tarahumara school? And Esidro in Huisichi? And, um, Luna, Miguel Luna …” I kept shotgunning names, hoping he’d hear one he recognized before body-slamming me against the wall and escaping into the hills behind the hotel. “… No, Manuel. Not Miguel Luna. Manuel. His son said you guys were friends. Marcelino? You know Marcelino?”
But the more I talked, the more his scowl deepened, until it looked downright menacing. I snapped my mouth shut. I’d learned my lesson after the Debacle at the Quimare Compound; maybe he’d cool out if I kept quiet and gave him a chance to size me up on his own. I stood silently while he squinted, suspicious and scornful, from under the brim of his straw campesino’s hat.
“Yeah,” he grunted. “Manuel is an amigo. Who the hell are you?”
Since I didn’t really know what was making him skittish, I started with who I wasn’t. I wasn’t a cop or a DEA agent, I told him. I was just a writer and busted-up runner who wanted to learn the secrets of the Tarahumara. If he was a fugitive, that was his own business. If anything, it boosted his credibility: anyone who could dodge the law for all these years with no getaway vehicle except his own two legs had sure made his bones as a wannabe Rarámuri. I could set aside my obligations to justice long enough to hear what had to be the escape tale of a lifetime.
Caballo’s scowl didn’t fade—but he didn’t try to get around me, either. Only later would I discover that I’d gotten extraordinarily lucky and stumbled across him at a strange time in his very strange life: in his own way Caballo Blanco was looking for me, too.
“Okay, man,” he said. “But I’ve got to get some beans.”
He led me out of the hotel and down a dusty alley to a small, unmarked door. We stepped over a little boy playing with a kitten on the doorstep and right into a tiny living room. An old woman looked up from an ancient gas stove in an adjoining alcove, where she was stirring a fragrant pot of frijoles.
“Hola, Caballo” she called.
“?Cómo está, Mamá?” Caballo Blanco called back. We took seats at a rickety wooden table in the living room. He’s got “mamás” all over the canyons, he said, little old ladies who’d fill him up on beans and tortillas for only a few centavos during his rambling vagabond runs.
Despite Mamá’s nonchalance, I could see why the Tarahumara were spooked when Caballo first came whisking through their woods. Fantastic feats of endurance under an unforgiving sun have left Caballo a little on the savage side. He’s well over six feet tall, with naturally fair skin that has weathered into shades ranging from pink on his nose to walnut on his neck. He’s so long-limbed and lean-muscled, he looks like the endoskeleton of a bulkier beast; melt the Terminator in a cauldron of acid, and Caballo Blanco is what comes out.
The desert glare had scrunched his eyes into a permanent squint, leaving his face capable of only two expressions: skepticism or amusement. No matter what I said for the rest of the night, I could never tell if he thought I was hilarious or full of shit. When Caballo turns his attention on you, he locks in hard; he listens as attentively as a hunter tracking game, seeming to get as much from the warbles of your voice as from the meaning of your words. Oddly, though, he still has an abominable ear for accents—after more than a decade in Mexico, his Spanish clanged so badly it sounded as if he were sounding it out from phonics cards.
“What freaked me out about you—,” Caballo began, but suddenly stopped, bug-eyed with hunger, as Mamá plopped big bowls in front of us and futzed over them with chopped cilantro and jalape?os and squirts of lime. The snarling look he’d given me back at the hotel wasn’t because I was standing between him and freedom; it was because I was standing between him and food. Caballo had set out that morning for a short hike to a natural thermal pool in the woods, but once he spotted a faint trail through the trees he’d never seen before, hike and hot tub were history. He took off running, and was still going hours later. He hit a mountain, but instead of turning back, he bent himself into a three-thousand-foot ascent, the equivalent of climbing to the top of the Empire State Building twice. Eventually, he linked onto a path back into Creel, turning what should have been a relaxing soak into a grueling trail marathon. By the time I shanghaied him in the hotel, he hadn’t eaten since sunup and was nearly delirious with hunger.
“I’m always getting lost and having to vertical-climb, water bottle between my teeth, buzzards circling over head,” he said. “It’s a beautiful thing.” One of the first and most important lessons he learned from the Tarahumara was the ability to break into a run anytime, the way a wolf would if it suddenly sniffed a hare. To Caballo, running has become as much of a first option in transportation as driving is to suburbanites; everywhere he goes, he goes at a lope, setting off as lightly equipped as a Neolithic hunter and with just as little concern about where—or how far away—he’ll end up.
“Look,” he said, pointing to his ancient hiking shorts and Dumpster-ready pair of Teva sandals. “That’s all I wear, and I’m always wearing them.”
He paused to shovel steaming mounds of spicy beans into his mouth, washing them down with long, thirsty pulls on a bottle of Tecate. Caballo polished off one bowl and was refilled by Mamá so quickly that he barely slowed his spoon, moving his hand from bowl to mouth to beer bottle with such ergonomic efficiency that dinner seemed less like the end of his long workout and more like its next phase. Listening to him from across the table was like listening to gas pumping into the tank of a car: scoop, chomp, chomp, gurgle, gurgle, scoop, chomp, chomp, gurgle …
Every once in a while, he’d lift his head and deliver a brief torrent of storytelling, then dip back down to his bowl. “Yeah, I used to be a fighter, man, ranked fifth in the world.” Back to the spoonwork “What freaked me out was, you just came blaring at me out of nowhere. We’ve had kidnappings and murders down here. Drug nastiness. Guy I know was kidnapped, wife paid a big ransom, then they killed him anyway. Nasty stuff. Good thing I got nothing. I’m just a gringo Indio, man, running humbly with the Rarámuri.”
“Sorry—,” I began, but his face was already back in the beans.
I didn’t want to bug Caballo with questions just yet, even though listening to him was like watching an art-house film in fast forward; traumas, jokes, fantasies, flashbacks, grudges, guilt over grudges, tantalizing fragments of ancient wisdom—they all came calliope-ing past in a blur too quick and disjointed to catch. He’d tell a story, move on to the next, skip ahead to the third, go back and correct a detail in the first, gripe about the guy in the second, then apologize for griping because, man, he’d spent his life trying to control his anger, and that was another story altogether….
His name was Micah True, he said, and he came from Colorado. Well, California, actually. And if I really wanted to understand the Rarámuri, I should have been there when this ninety-five-year-old man came hiking twenty-five miles over the mountain. Know why he could do it? Because no one ever told him he couldn’t. No one ever told him he oughta be off dying somewhere in an old age home. You live up to your own expectations, man. Like when he named himself after his dog. That’s where the name “True” really came from, his old dog. He didn’t always measure up to good old True Dog, but that was another story, too….
I waited, scraping at the label of my beer bottle with a fingernail, wondering if he’d ever simmer down enough for me to figure out what the hell he was talking about. Gradually, Caballo’s spoonwork slowed and came to a stop. He drained his second bottle of Tecate and sat back, satisfied.
“Guadajuko!” he said with a toothy grin. “Good word to learn. That’s Rarámuri for ‘cool.’”
I pushed a third Tecate across the table. He eyed it with that skeptical, sun-scorched squint. “I don’t know, man,” he said. “Not eating all day, I can’t hold it like the Rarámuri.”
But he picked it up and took a sip. Thirsty work, rambling up sky-scraping mesas. He took a long, chugging pull, then relaxed way back in his chair, tipping the front legs up and lacing his fingers across his lean belly. Something had just clicked inside him; I could tell before he even said another word. Maybe he needed those last twelve ounces of beer to loosen up, or maybe he’d just had to blow out some pent-up steam before relaxing into his story.
Because when Caballo started to talk this time, he kept me spellbound. He talked deep into the night, telling an amazing story that spanned the ten years since his disappearance from the outside world and was full of bizarre characters, amazing adventures, and furious fights. And, in the end, a plan. An audacious plan.
A plan, I gradually realized, that involved me.