Walkers by Graham Masterton Page B

tractor, and occasionally wiping the sweat from his forehead with
the back of his arm.
    Gil brought the Mustang to a halt,
and a cloud of sandy-coloured dust drifted away through the eucalyptus trees
which shaded the back of Santo’s property. Gil jumped out, and walked over to
stand next to Santos and join him in staring at the tractor.
    ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked Santos.
    ‘You’ve been eating onions,’ Santos
remarked.
    ‘So what? What’s wrong with the
tractor?’
    ‘Won’t go.’
    ‘Do you know what’s the matter with
it?’
    Santos swallowed beer, and then spat
into the dust. ‘If I knew what the matter with it was, I’d fix it.’
    ‘Maybe the fuel line.’
    ‘Maybe the fuel line what?’
    ‘Well, maybe it’s clogged. That
happens with tractors, working in dirty conditions.’
    Santos stared at the tractor for a
moment or two longer, then let the spanner drop on to the ground with a clank.
‘Come inside,’ he said. ‘Do you feel like a beer? Where have you been for so
long? These past two months, I’ve hardly seen you.’
    They walked into the house. It was
shadier inside, but not much cooler. In the blue and yellow-tiled kitchen,
Santos’s mother was making empanadas, and occasionally flicking away flies with
the fringe of her black embroidered shawl.
    ‘How’re you doing, Mrs Ramona?’ Gil
asked her.
    ‘Phoof, don’t ask me,’ Mrs Ramona
replied. Her face was thin and wrinkled and her eyes were as black and
glittering as two beetles, nestling in the sockets of her skull.
    ‘My husband is still sick, you know;
the winery is cutting their workforce; who knows what will happen?’
    Santos went to the icebox and took
out two more beers. He lobbed one across the kitchen to Gil, and Gil caught it
left-handed.
    ‘Come through,’ said Santos, and
they walked through to Santos’s bedroom. Santos kicked the door shut behind
them, and suddenly Gil felt peaceful and quiet and very enclosed.
    To look at Santos, it was almost
impossible to guess that he had a room like this. He was short and podgy, and
his shirt was always hanging out of his jeans. He had one of those Mexican
faces that reminded Gil of Mayan masks, flat as a pancake, and featureless. His
black hair was combed into a 1950’s crest at the front and duck-tailed at the
back. He spat a lot, by way of punctuation.
    His room, however, was almost
monastic. It was white painted and cool. The bed was neatly draped with a plain
light-blue cover. There was a pale oak closet with brass hinges and a shelf
with half a dozen books on it, all in Spanish and all concerned with mysticism.
On the wall between the two shuttered windows there was a large gilt and enamel
crucifix, set with red glass rubies and pieces of mirror.
    The Christ that hung on it was like
a pink-painted doll, with an almost ludicrously agonised expression on His
face.
    ‘Well, what worry brings you here?’
asked Santos, prizing off his sweaty loafers and sitting cross-legged on the
bed. He tugged the ring-pull of his beer-can, and sucked at the opening before
it could foam out too much.
    ‘Does it have to be a worry? Maybe I
just felt like shooting the breeze with my old friend Santos.’
    ‘You sound more and more like a bad
cowboy movie every time you come here.
    What’s the matter? You’re forgetting
those times we had, those bottles of wine we drank, those things we talked
about?’
    Gil shook his head. He hadn’t opened
his beer yet. He kept the ice-cold can pressed against his chest. ‘It was
because of those things we talked about that I came this afternoon.’
    ‘Which things in particular?’
    ‘Magic. You know, people who can
work magic. Shamans, medicine men, people like that. People who can make
themselves invisible, and people who know everything about you even though
they’ve never met you before.’
    ‘Oh, yeah?’ asked Santos. He seemed
unimpressed, but Gil could tell that he was interested.
    Gil said, simply, ‘I went out
jogging on the beach