Lines and shadows (49 page)

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would be if those hissing maracas—
Cha cha, cha cha cha
!—were meant to warn not pollos but
them
, the Barfers.

Maybe it would take a foreigner like Chano B. Gomez, Jr., to know how typically American it was to thrust ten young men into a monstrous international dilemma with an implied mission to dramatize it. It made for many a good show down there in the natural amphitheater of Deadman's Canyon, if you were perched on a rock at the top. They gave their nightly performances and almost everyone applauded. They did it the only way they knew—not ingeniously, merely instinctively—by trying to resurrect in the late twentieth century a mythic hero who never was, not even in the nineteenth century. A myth nevertheless cherished by Americans beyond the memory of philosophers, statesmen, artists and scientists who really lived: the quintessentially American myth and legend of the Gunslinger, who with only a six-shooter and star dares venture beyond the badlands. Beyond all charts. Even to the phantom line between substance and shadow. To draw against the drop.

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