Far Bright Star (7 page)

Napoleon snapped cold with ferocity. It was a profound logic that ruled the chaos. He looked up and the dark front of the sky was full of fiery shapes and darting black figures. Another rider came at him and he could hear him by the horse he rode, a roaring broken-winded horse. He turned and the horse was crashing against his chest before he could move. The blow from the horse knocked the air from inside his chest and he was spun around and knocked back. His feet left the ground and he was hurtling for the short distance it took to meet the rushing ground.

His .45 lost, he raised himself onto his knees and turned on his waist to see the flash of a machete above his head. It paused as if the tipped wing of a steel bird about to plunge. His killer had a gold tooth and a black mustache and wore white trousers patched at the knees. He could see the whites of his eyes and his white teeth. His eyes were black and his face, the view of his mind, was as if a face in rictus.

His guts twisted. He knew he was dead and was wondering what death would be like when the Rattler horse, lithe as a cat, lurched onto its front feet, stretched out with its long neck and head and took the man’s whole face in its wide mouth. The bite swallowed whatever cry there might have been. It tore away the man’s nose and cheek meat, his lips and mustache and his eyebrows and all the skin and meat that was the man’s face.

The place where the man’s face had been was turned to blood. He stood horribly crimsoned with the hot blood springing from his faceless head and wreathing his neck and caping his shoulders. Then came his sourceless scream. It pitched and seized and pitched again. It stayed in the air even as he collapsed to the ground where he quivered and trembled, wanting to touch his face but unable to.

Napoleon called out and turned as Extra Billy, already aware, had made his own turn on the machete and was swung through and aligning his aim for the shot when he was struck by a deadly bullet gliding into his side and it cut him down. The bullet that found his chest hurled him sideways and crumpled him to the ground where he lay in the shakes of death.

He knew that feeling. He had been shot before, his insides flashing as if suddenly a pool of hell.

Extra Billy opened his mouth to groan but was soundless for how consuming the quenchless fire that’d been lit in the mangling of his chest. Already his clothes were soggy with blood as it pumped from inside him with each convulsive twitch. Blood crept from the corner of his mouth and down his chin. Extra Billy was a hard one and the hard ones don’t let go easily. He listened to the terrible gasping of the man’s last moments, the tiniest gusts of air leaving his lungs. He was dying by seconds and in agony as his heart pumped his blood from his body onto the floor of the earth. Then he raised an arm as if reaching for the distance and when his arm fell he was gone. Extra Billy had been a good man and he wished for him some swifter means of death, but that was not the one given him.

Napoleon turned again, searching the ground for a weapon. The place he stood had become a lake of blood and was as if every death and misery in human experience was concentrated at his feet. He caught sight of Preston standing erect amid the ruck of battle. He was holding up his hand and looking at it in amazement. His index finger had been shot away at the second joint. He was then laying down his rifle and holding his arms wide open as if in supplication.

Their small world was a blur of sound and light and the blood still blooming from the many wounds. He cast a desperate glance to the rock wall where Bandy was stationed. He hoped to see the boy scurrying the heights, the last of his legs disappearing over the top, but there was no sign of the boy he could find.

He turned again and to his amazement, Extra Billy was staggering beside him, as if half awake, half asleep. His cold eyes were smiling, his skin burnished amber and in his bloody hand he held a .45. Standing his legs astraddle he shot down three men before the guns turned on him again. The bullets shattered through his laddered ribs, lacerated his heart, and delivered unto him the hardest truth.

Then a brilliant light exploded in his own head and was a suffusion of blunt and liquid pain. He fought against the sensation that was sweeping through him. He cried out his brother’s name, but he could not endure the red-violet explosion inside his head and the light eclipsed and this day’s work was over for him as well and that was the last he knew of the battle.

12

T
WO RIDERS CAME FORWARD.
They sat above him on horseback, their horses’ tails whisking flies. They carried Mausers and sheathed machetes down their backs, the hilts in reach at their shoulders. One man’s britches were torn away at the knees and the other wore canvas leggings from another war in a previous century.

For all the pain he felt, in his head and body were the promises of pain yet to be experienced as all around him lay the glassy-eyed dead. When he stood, the last of that scene came to him in the faint groans of one of the fallen. It did not matter who it was, one of his or one of theirs, the man’s groans struck upon his heart as a hammer might. So were the last of the screams and sighs and tears and groans of that small place where men fought and died so fiercely. Never again would they rise up from the ground. Never again would they fight on this given earth.

He wanted to look to the wall. Had the boy been able to climb the wall or crawl inside the rock itself and squirrel himself away? He’d experienced enough such miracles to accept the miraculous as common enough. He hoped the boy was so favored this day.

Then he watched as Preston stood up from the ground. His head had been cut by blade or bullet and the opening bled in a curtain down the side of his face. He moved a hand as if waving off a fly, searching the air for his shot-away finger. He held his pistol in his other hand and then he let it slip from his hand.

The two riders indicated they were to take off their boots and hand them up. They tossed out gunnysacks and gestured they were to be placed over their heads. Then they flung out the long loops of their reatas and caught them in their nooses and pulled tight. The braided rawhide was smooth and light but closed tight as a vice at their necks. The riders dallied the ropes around their saddle horns as they directed the turning of their horses and slowly Napoleon and Preston were led away.

As they stumbled along they could hear as they were joined by more riders in ever-increasing numbers. They were jostled and bumped and fell down more than once, struggling blindly to regain their footing lest they be strangled to death because the riders did not stop. They continued on, the horses’ walk slow and inexorable and fixed in direction.

Forced to go bootless it wasn’t long before Napoleon had very little skin left on the soles of his feet. The land pricked and slivered, spiked and burned, and his feet stung and were as if set afire and the airless and heated gunnysack was soon a suffocating ordeal.

“Steady,” he kept saying. His head throbbed and he staggered like a drunken man. “Steady. Keep your legs.”

He then fell and hit his head and was dragged by his neck because he was unconscious for a time. When he came to, he realized some last and desperate effort to live had twisted his right arm in the rawhide and held on; otherwise he would have been strangled because they did not stop for him and kept going. He was being dragged by the rope over the rocks and through the briary mesquite. Then mercifully, the rider paused to light a cigarette and he was able to gain his feet again.

After a long hard walk they were prodded onto horseback and with riders to the right and left of them they rode hard from the scene of the battle. How far they rode or in what direction he could not keep his calculation. His lungs ached for breath and agonizing pain stabbed at his temples and the fire in his feet burned into his legs. The land sloped gently upward and he knew they were climbing, but that was all. They could be climbing anywhere, in any direction. The trail leveled for a time and then became steeper yet. His mind’s exertion was fully directed at not passing out and falling from the horse, because to have fallen from the horse without sight, there would be no way to turn, to reach, to catch the ground, to not land on his head and break his neck. So he clung to the saddle horn and a fistful of mane and reasoned if he fell he’d hold to these, even if his arms were to break.

Then, after what seemed forever, they were stopped and dismounted. He stepped gingerly because he could not now feel his feet and his legs were simply the posts his body was perched upon. When the gunnysack was lifted from his head the first light he saw was the fading light of dusk, the dark light before darkness, the light before the silver shine of the stars. He became aware of a ringing in his ears, but then it stopped. Then there was another sound and at first he could not figure out what it was and then he understood it to be a baby crying. Then there was the clinking of bridles and a mule brayed and then all sound rushed in and he could hear again.

They were in some mountain notch, the place of a secluded encampment with no sign of a way in or out. There was water and grass and growing on the periphery were stunted pine and live oak.

There were several dozen of them and they were a motley band of soldiers, women and children. They were all ages and their features ranged from brown-skinned Indian to blue-eyed Spanish. Some few rode richly furnished mounts while for others a sheepskin tied to the horse’s back was enough.

The women were preparing the evening meal. They wore green and blue dresses with red sashes tied about their waists and shawls they wore over their shoulders and sometimes their heads. They were unloading mules that were packed with firewood, kettles and sacks of beans and corn and braided chilies.

These women, he wondered, how many of their sons, brothers, lovers, husbands had he killed this day?

Soon there were fires burning and they hung cuts of meat from the newly slaughtered beeves on iron spits where the slabs of beef smoked and roasted. A large copper boiler shined in the firelight. In that they’d make their frijoles. The corn they ground by hand they mixed with lard. Soon there were yellow stacks of tortillas piling up beside the hot kettles. There would be beef, frijoles and parched corn, and tortillas baked on fires in ovens fashioned from oil cans.

There were some riders who never dismounted and had their tortillas and frijoles and beef handed up to them. These were the Dorados—the chosen men who died so willingly, and this evening there were some fewer than who started the day. He admired them as warriors. They were rare to surrender and as impractical as it might seem, they were willing to die for their honor.

The grueling ride had been difficult for Preston. He was much weakened and near to shattered. With his first step he collapsed on the ground where he still lay. He appeared obsessed with his missing finger as he could not seem to avert his eyes. He cradled that hand in his other as if a small wounded other.

Napoleon thought to say something to Preston as he was his commander and they were comrades and fellow countrymen, but he could not help the anger he felt. So it was Preston who spoke first.

“We are in a suffering condition,” he said, clasping his wounded, blood-caked hand to his chest.

“Stop sniveling,” Napoleon said. “You will shame them.” He carefully let himself to the ground close to Preston.

“What do they want?”

“We will find out what they want when they want us to know.”

From where he lay he watched men pitching shovels into the dry dusty earth. He at first thought they were digging graves, but it made no sense. If they wanted graves dug they’d have them dig their own graves and he’d seen enough of the countryside to know that graves were rarely afforded the executed. The desiccating sun and wind and the carrion eaters made short enough work of the shot and hanged. He listened intently to what they were saying, but he could not tell the language they were talking. He was not sure who they were or where their loyalties lay in this many-sided civil war.

As to the digging, his wonderings were answered for him when the pit was not so deep and they began dragging ammunition boxes from it and then a cache of rifles, a machine gun, and cartridge strips. They pulled wooden crates from where they’d been buried and they were marked with the same black letters as so many of the crates delivered south and stockpiled in the depot at expedition headquarters.

The crates of rifles and the machine gun and the ammunition retrieved, Napoleon and Preston were ushered to the edge and made to get inside the pit left by the digging. Then the young cowboy who’d attempted to parley before the battle approached them. He assumed from the start the boy was one of the Americans hired as dynamiters, machine-gun operators, soldiers of fortune.

“What are they singing about?” he asked the boy.

“Love, hunger, leaving home. What else is there?” the boy said, squatting at the edge of the pit.

“Not much, I guess.”

“She wants to know if either of you is a dynamiter. They need one. Theirs was killed.” Then he said, “She wants to know if you’re one?”

“She who?”

“The one what runs this outfit.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t know anything about the stuff.”

“Have it your way,” the boy said.

It was then Preston found his legs, rose to his full height, and said, “Would they consider a ransom?”

The boy gave him a funny look and then made a low humming sound in his throat.

“Listen,” Preston proposed, taking out his wallet. “Tell them if it’s money they want?”

Stupidly, Preston did not understand they would have his money whether he gave it to them or not, have it in whatever way they wanted to have it.

He told Preston to shut up and then to the boy, “You look kind of pale for this climate. What’s your game?”

“I ain’t going to ask you to live,” the boy said. “Show them you know dynamite and you might be able to make it out of here.”

“What about him?”

“I think they got other business with him.”

“You mean you want me to show you,” Napoleon said, daubing at his powder-grimed face. “That’s your game, ain’t it. You let your mouth write a check your ass can’t cash.”

“You shut your trap, you old peckerhead.”

“You’re supposed to be the dynamiter, only you don’t know how.”

“They’re going to kill you.”

“If they do, I don’t think I’ll be the only one they kill,” he said, and with that the boy righted himself and stalked away.

Soon after that they were brought from the shallow pit and their hands tied behind their backs and they were made to kneel in the dirt. In defiance he lay down on his side and closed his eyes and his action became enough reason for Preston to topple beside him.

There came a distant commotion from the far side of the encampment, a marshalling of force and then it came on and was a kind of pageantry he’d rarely seen.

A white horse bearing a woman rider at a bridling gait hove up to the place where they lay. She wore her hair in a long black braid, a black fitted skirt and a white shirtwaist with a pearl gray suede vest. She wore a soft gray felt hat with an ostrich plume, pink-tinted glasses, and a pistol in a belt filled with ammunition. A braided leather quirt dangled from her wrist.

This was one of the recurring women riders he’d seen through the field glasses. He could see that she was an accomplished horsewoman and the horse bearing her was perhaps the finest he’d ever seen. The horse stood sixteen hands with a massive chest. It had a slightly convex face and large oval eyes. It wore a broad forehead and carried a long heavy neck, an abundant mane, and a thick low-set tail. Its saddle was embroidered with silver and there were silver cheek plates in the form of conchas on the harness. The horse was further adorned with a silvered face piece and breastplate. The tapaderas covering the stirrups were intricately silvered as well. It was an Andalusian, a purebred Spanish horse.

The woman’s dress and manners and beauty, as well as the horse’s, were high born. Napoleon took her to be from the wealthiest class and existing at a distance from the world, a distance that went beyond money and possession. In this land there were haciendas as big as a million acres. These were people with their own private kingdoms, their own private countries, and their own private armies.

Two Yaqui rode beside her in full war paint. They rode matched golden duns with tiger eyes. They were hard beasts with dead eyes in their faces, the horses and the Yaquis. The Yaqui were tall and broad shouldered and they wore two bandoleers around their waists and two more across their naked chests. Riderless ponies dallied behind them with rotting heads impaled on the saddle horns. The heads wore long hair and in death their faces were crumpled with pain and their mouths shriveled and unmistakable smiles. Close by there was another woman who rode with them. This must have been the other woman he’d seen. Except this woman was a window manikin held upright in the saddle by a thin frame of steel. She too rode a fine white horse and was dressed similarly to the actual woman, a slant parasol puppeting above her head.

There was another who rode behind her. He wore a broad sombrero, silver-studded trousers, and a goatskin jacket. He was the one with the .45, its grips inlaid with mother-of-pearl and there were others in her party, their mounts gaunt, rough animals, with visible ribs and hip bones, but they were armed to the teeth and possessed the air of assassins. These other men had no politics. They were in loyal service only to the woman.

The boy came to them again.

“This is against the law,” Preston said. It was a fatal part of his character not to bend at times, not to be pushed around.

“You want me tell her that?” the boy said.

“Yes,” he said.

The boy went to her side and spoke to her. Then he returned to where they kneeled.

“She says she is the law,” the boy said.

Before Preston could respond, the woman gave a signal and two men approached and dragged Napoleon and Preston onto their knees and roughly blindfolded them. He could hear Preston beside him, protesting his treatment. Then he felt the muzzle of a gun barrel at the back of his head. He tried to imagine another world where none of this was happening, but he could not. Preston went silent and there was silence at the ground and in the air. Then there was the sound of two triggers being cocked, one and then the other.

When the threat of death became imminent, Napoleon, like some men, extended an invitation. He felt daring, even hungry for it. He fell in love with the thought of it and wanted it as much as he wanted to live.