Free Lookout Hill (9781101606735) by Ralph W. Cotton Page A

anymore.”
    “Oh,” she said as if she understood.
    In the night, the boy had shaken his sleeping father as soon as he’d heard the sound of distant gunfire. Yet by the time his father was awake, the gunfire had seized. The night beyond the open windows of their small hillside adobe lay as silent as stone.
    “I heard it, Papa,” said the young man with determination when his father seemed skeptical. “By the saints, I heard it—this was
not
thunder.”
    His father stared at him and batted the clinging remnants of sleep from his eyes. He let out a long breath and looked around for his trousers even though they hung from the same peg where he’d hung his trousers for twenty years.
    “Do you not believe me, Papa?” the young man asked.
    “
Sí
, Julio, I believe you, my son,” Umberto said. Hepulled the thin peasant trousers down from the peg and shook them for scorpions before stepping into them. “From the
gringos locos
, you say?”
    “
Sí
, from the crazy
americanos
,” said Julio. “The shot of a pistol and the double blasts of an
escopeta
.”
    “The
escopeta
is for wolves and coyotes,” said Umberto. “The old gringo uses it too freely, I think. But the
pistola
is worrisome, especially in the night.” He tied the strings of his trousers at the waist and picked up a machete from against the wall. “We go.”
    “
Sí
, we go,” said Julio. Having anticipated his father’s decision, he’d put on his sandals, his trousers and shirt, and thrown on a frayed poncho. A machete was hooked to his waistband, and a straw sombrero hung behind his shoulders from a string around his neck. “It is at times like this I wish we owned a horse.”
    “Oh?” said Umberto, eyeing him. “Why? So we could kill it on these dark high trails?”
    Julio didn’t answer.
    “Besides, we travel across the rocks from here to the
gringos locos
quicker than any horse,” Umberto said. “A horse must have a trail of some sort. We need no trail, nothing but a place to put a foot, a spot to clasp a hand, eh?”
    “
Sí
, Papa,” said Julio, wishing he had kept his mouth shut. A man did not speak of things he
wished for
. Wishing was for fools and wistful young girls. He kept a hand on the handle of his machete.
    When they’d left the adobe, they did not walk down to the trail lying two hundred feet below. Instead they had moved right out the side door of the house andonto the steep, rocky hillside and negotiated the jagged terrain like driven, agile spiders.
    They climbed silently upward and sidelong over boulder and spur and moved effortlessly down broken rock faces like two dark teardrops. At a steep, rocky ledge, Umberto made it a point to stop long enough for his son to look down at a sharp turn in the winding switchback trail that they both knew would have taken over an hour longer to reach were they relying on horse or donkey.
    The two stared out across a steep wall of rock that rimmed the trails and hillsides in a half circle and stood high and vertical against the night sky.
    “
Desea un caballo,
eh?” Umberto asked his son.
    Julio gave a slight smile.
    “No, Papa, I do not
want a horse
,” he said.
    “
Qué?
” said Umberto, taunting his son a little. “I did not hear you.”
    “I said, ‘No, Papa,’” said Julio. “No
caballo
.”
    Umberto chuckled as they both took off their sandals and dusted the soles together before shoving them down into their waistbands.
    “
Ahora el viaje comienza,
” Umberto said, standing.
    “
Sí
, Papa,” said Julio, “now the travel begins.”
    They stepped over the edge of the cliff and moved on.
    It was silvery daylight when they had walked onto the hillside overlooking the Bryants’ narrow home on the rocky valley floor. When they reached the bottom of the hillside and started across the stretch of brush and wild grass, they stopped at the sight of Dudley Bryant and both dogs, Big and Little, lying dead and bloody on the ground. No sooner had they come uponthe