Cape Hell (14 page)

“He is not
El Presidente
Diaz's only enemy. Are you still so interested to hear what this man has to say?”

I drank, swallowed. The spirits crawled up my spine, down my arm, and into the torn heel of my hand, numbing the pain. Up ahead the
Ghost
conserved its strength, its iron heart pumping in measured beats like a lion at rest. “The fire behind, the plague, too, and now a blizzard of bullets. What's a little quiet conversation compared to that?”

He grunted and fisted the bottle. “Here, a man need not burden himself wondering what to do next. The country decides.”

*   *   *

We had another
bracer apiece, then put the spirits away and got up to leave the coach. It was a relief to get to my feet without dizziness; my strength was back at last, if made a bit more buoyant by alcohol. We filled the canteen from a cask of water, pocketed some tins of food, and requisitioned extra belts of ammunition from the arsenal.

Just before stepping down I turned back and laced my arms through the bails of two buckets of coal oil, and gestured to him to do the same. He did so without question.

We put in another fifteen miles before sundown and pulled onto a siding in a notch that had been blasted into the mountainside to rest. Travel at night was risky, especially with the threat of a tree or a boulder blocking the tracks, either by natural or human design, and Joseph said the line wasn't exclusive to the
Ghost,
for all its loneliness: “The weekly express from Guadalajara is due any month.”

Like a garment soaked with sweat in the heat of day, the jungle damp turned clammy after dark. We were warm enough in the blankets we'd brought from the coach, but the cramped quarters of the cab stiffened our muscles and we stirred often, Joseph muttering half-awake oaths in a combination of Spanish and Indian, I more often bumping against something hard and protruding, bruising my scalp, cracking that inconveniently placed knob of bone on the inside of the elbow and sending a wave of pain and nausea all the way up my arm. More than once I thought of stepping down and sleeping on the ground, but I had a horror of cockroaches, so much a part of that country the revolutionists had written them into their anthem. It was no idle fear: When my groin itched I reached down to scratch it, blaming too many days and nights spent in the same clothes, and something the size of a ground squirrel crawled onto the back of my hand. I leapt to my feet, shouting and cracking my skull on the roof of the cab, and shook the thing out into the night.

Joseph opened one eye, the white glistening in ragged moonlight. I told him what had happened.

“You should have waited. He was only looking for a warm place to curl up.”

“I'm not in the business of providing shelter for vermin.”

“You must learn to accept this country for what it is, and not wish it could be what it is not. Men have gone mad wishing.” He turned over and resumed snoring, in that steady, half-pleasant way of the native tribes.

I inspected myself and the blanket for more intruders, gave the blanket a vigorous shake just in case, and lay back down. I didn't know I'd fallen back asleep until I dreamed again of Lefty Dugan. He doffed his hat and bowed his head to show me the hole I'd opened there, shiny as a shotgun bore.

I should of left you to drown in that river, Page.

He wasn't speaking so much as willing the words into my head, where they dropped and lay like dead ash from spent kindling.

My eyes popped open. I'd have slept easier with the roach. I slid out from under the blanket and stepped down, carrying the Whitney rifle. I'd traded the ticking-cap for my hat; the sweatband felt like snail-slime against my forehead. I walked alongside the tracks, paying no attention to things that crunched under my boots. On a cloudless night in the mountains, the stars were as big as Christmas balls, the quarter-moon hanging so close to the earth I could grab its bottom horn with both hands and pull myself up to my chin.

The hours of darkness belonged to the lesser creatures. The din of crickets and tree-frogs was as loud as the Barbary Coast at midnight, with the empty-barrel gulp of the odd bullfrog coming in at intervals so irregular they were impossible to predict; it had waked me every time. In the distance—it might have been my imagination, caused by all our talk—the cry of a hunting cat shredded the heavy overlay of sound like someone tearing canvas.

I don't know how much time I spent walking, but when I stopped and turned back, the train was almost out of sight, its black prow visible only as the silver-blue steam drifted through the slots in the cowcatcher like a phantom passing through solid matter. I trudged back, hoisted myself up by the grab-rail, and wound myself back into the blanket, clutching the rifle as if it would stand off nightmares the way it did men and beasts. The rest of the night was as long as what had come before, and although I slept no more I was glad when first light came. I assumed men who were condemned to hang at dawn welcomed the end of that last night just as much.

 

NINETEEN

“
J
esus Dio!
”
Joseph
hauled back on the brake.

The wheels screamed, showering sparks in fantails on both sides of the cab; one of them landed square on the back of the hand that was still healing. It stung like a wasp, but I hardly noticed it. I was too busy flying backward.

I was an India-rubber ball attached to an elastic band. I slammed against the stacked wood in the tender, the impact slapping my lungs flat. Then the band contracted, pitching me forward; but I was ready for that. I threw my hands against the cast-iron panel with its goggle-eyed gauges, catching myself before my head could go into the open firebox. There I leaned, pumping air back into my chest. I was a broken bellows sucking up shards of glass.

The rest of my senses blinked back on like bubbles popping in thick soup. My vision cleared, the engine wheezed rhythmically, I smelled the sharp odor of steel on steel, identified the sour-iron aftertaste of fear on my tongue. My ears ached from the shrieking of the wheels.

Every curse my father had taught me came to mind, along with some refinements I'd picked up in battle and on the cattle trail, but I choked them back. I respected Joseph's mastery of his machine. Most times he operated it as if the brakes didn't exist. All I could see was his hunched back, seemingly decapitated; he'd stuck his head that far through the opening on the left, straining to peer up the tracks. The muscles on the hand gripping the brake handle were bunched tight, stretching the glove taut.

I peeled my palms away from the front of the cab. The wound was throbbing now, aggravated by the live spark that had burned a hole through the bandage. “Did we hit something?”

No reply. He pried loose his grasp. The handle looked crimped, as if by a pair of powerful pliers. I couldn't remember if it had been that way before, but I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd done it with his fist alone. He blew out a bellyful of pent-up air and hopped down from the cab.

I followed. I thought of the rifle only when I was on the ground. I didn't go back for it. Something about the episode told me it wouldn't be useful.

It wasn't. A great dark heap lay across the tracks, not ten feet from where the locomotive had come to rest. I thought at first part of the mountain had fallen away, and felt the full force of the collision we'd narrowly missed.

Then the wind kicked up, clearing away the steam from the pipes and the smoke from the wheels, and I saw it was no rockslide, although the result wouldn't have been different if we had hit it. Coarse black hair stirred in the current of air, the tips glinting, as if they'd been dipped in silver by a smith. A slagheap of muscle beneath. I caught another smell then, of rank sweat and suet and something more visceral, thick and pungent, like musty wine gushing from a shattered barrel; the last expulsion of life, spilling out like—

“Guts.” Joseph pointed to a glistening red pile a few feet away from the mound, still steaming even in that torpid climate; the last combative gasp of a life lived on its own terms.

I walked around to the front of the thing, which was pointed in the direction of the mountains, the blunt muzzle with its shotgun-bore nostrils raised slightly; inexorably, the brute had been heading for high ground, nose into the wind. The ears were tiny in comparison to the oven-size head, the open eyes like black shoe-buttons; but the corrugated lips were curled back to expose fangs the length and thickness of a man's thumb, defiant even in death. Extinct, the American Grizzly still boiled with savage hate. The remnants of its breath stank of raw fish and fermented juniper berries. I thought of sardines preserved in gin.

Joseph took its left rear paw with its calliope of razor-sharp black claws and lifted it with both hands. The old fellow still had his lungs; they hadn't got them. A gust passed through the reeds of its throat: more rank air, accompanied by a roar, or rather the ghost of one; a sickly thing, almost a bleat, with only the memory of power behind it, but it was enough to shrink my spine. I sprang back; impossible not to, even knowing the source. I'd heard too many stories of hunters slain by a beast they thought was killed.

“He is warm still,” the Indian said. “I should say he has not been dead an hour. But he came here with more inside him.” His arm swept across the pile of guts; it was too small to account for the size of the cavity. “He was killed and gutted, but to what purpose? The meat remains.”

“One of your pumas, interrupted by the train.”

“I have never known one to attack a grizzly, let alone win. Also the cat eats from the outside in, starting with the neck and shoulders, then the buttocks. They have not been touched. Always he saves the insides for dessert.” He groped the thick mantle of matted fur encircling the massive neck, stopped, probed, then held up a forefinger, stained purple to the second knuckle. “Gunshot wound. Man is the only animal who slays for anything other than food.”

“There's only one reason anyone would shoot down a bear on railroad tracks and not take the skin or meat.”

Immediately he straightened and joined me in scanning the forest. Birds perched and nested undisturbed among the branches.

“It is not a good place for an ambush,” he said. “The undergrowth is too thick, and a man in a tree presents too good a target. One cannot choose where a bear will decide to cross the rails.”

“But why take away the guts?”

“
Quien sabe?
The other thing about man is one can seldom judge his actions until it is too late.”

The Indian was getting to be tiresome company. He seemed never to grow weary about being right.

*   *   *

Neither of us
was foolish enough to attempt to remove eight hundred lifeless pounds from the tracks without a brace of oxen, but after contemplating the immense mound of hair and flesh and gristle and bone I went back to the locomotive and brought two buckets of coal oil. Joseph, catching the significance, did the same, and we spent ten minutes splashing the contents over the carcass, soaking it to the skin; by the time we finished, our eyes were watering from the fumes. He backed up the train another fifty yards for safety's sake while I wrapped a rag around a branch I broke off a tree and saturated it with what was left in the last bucket. I stepped back and touched a match to the rag. It went up with a sucking sound. I cocked my arm and flung the torch at the bear.

Blue flame traced a narrow path through thick hair toward the hump behind the grizzly's neck, and then the rest of the heap caught with a thud that shook the ground. By then I'd retreated almost as far as the train, but I felt the heat all down my front. The flames leapt sixty feet into the air, gushing black smoke that would continue to stain the blank sky long hours after we'd pulled away. My nostrils shrank from the stench of scorched hair, fumes, and roasting meat.

The long coarse guard hairs, designed to shed water, went first, flaring yellow and peeling away from the tan downy undergrowth, like yellowed cotton batting, that kept the animal warm when the mercury fell below zero. Next came the flesh, such a bright pink that many hunters would rather take the hide from a skunk than a bear; the naked carcass looked too much like a freshly skinned human being. I turned away at that point.

We lay over for the night while the obstruction smoldered, taking turns carrying the red safety lantern to flag down any other trains that might approach from behind; it was obvious none would be coming from the other direction, with the fire making a beacon visible for miles.

I fed and watered the bay and walked it along the track away from the burning hulk and its sinister stench. The horse placed its hooves carefully; days aboard a moving train had robbed it of its faith in stationary surfaces. I gave it a sympathetic pat, but just one. That breed of creature and I understood each other too well to expect any greater sign of affection.

The fire was still burning at dawn, but by the time the sun cleared the mountains the bear was a pile of charred bones, stubborn clumps of smoking fur, and simmering puddles of grease. If anything it looked more fearsome in that state, like something prehistoric from a time when the earth was no safe place for man. The hooped rib cage, big as it was—a full-size man could have crawled through it on hands and knees without brushing the sides—brought me back to the abandoned dugout where we'd spent a night, and the bones of the murdered Pinkerton detective, like hollow wooden flutes. He'd made a study of Oscar Childress and wound up a skeleton; the grizzly had attracted his attention or that of someone like him, and ended the same way. I'd been sent to kill him. What was to prevent me from leaving my own bones behind in Mexico?

“Nothing,” Joseph said.

I jumped; no matter how civilized an Indian, he always managed to come up on a white man noiselessly. “What?”