In the Rogue Blood (32 page)

They laid him in the shade of a rock overhang and gave him more water and a portion of food and treated his wounds except for his savaged scalp for which nothing could be done.

“Your head’s festering and you got a mean fever. I guess you’ll either die of it or you won’t. But hell, I knew a fella was scalped to the bone by Kiowas and lived to tell the tale for years till he choked to death on one a his wife’s biscuits.”

Speaking was Jack Spooner, the sole white man in that gang of eighteen until now. “Even if you don’t die you won’t have need of any more barbers or be turning the ladies’ heads, that’s sure.” He studied Edward’s mutilated cheek for a moment, then his remaining portion of ear. “I gotta say, boy, you missin more pieces off your head than just about any living man I ever seen.” He turned and spat and looked off to the open country and then looked at Edward again. “We’re ridin out tomorrow so we aint gonna know if you live or die unless you ride with us. Manuel says you can if you want.”

“Who’s Manuel?” Edward asked.

“The chief,” Spooner said. He gestured toward the Mexican who had given Edward water out on the playa. He was sitting in the shade of another rock with several others, gesticulating, laughing with them at the tale he told.

“I got no outfit,” Edward said. His crown felt as if live coals were pressing upon it.

“We’ll outfit you. You can pay the chief for it later. If you die I don’t guess he’ll hold you to accounts.”

They rested that day and through the night there in the foothills of the Sierra Ponce just south of the del Norte. The downcountry flatland was bone-white under a pale half-moon and the Carmen range stood starkly purple in the east. Comets described bright amber streaks across the black void and vanished from existence in the same instant they appeared.

The gang was up before dawn and made ready to move out. Edward was redeyed and dizzy with fever. The chieftain walked up to him trailing his horse and grinned and asked if he was sure he wanted to go with them. “Maybe you want be here hasta los Comanches come otra vez. Maybe you want for to kill all them for because they kill you friends.”

That got a laugh from the two or three other Mexicans who understood English and they told the rest what the chief had said. All of them laughed and slapped one another on the shoulder and pointed at Edward and rubbed the crowns of their heads and laughed harder still. Spooner smiled. Edward felt as if the world were slightly atilt under his feet and he could not quite get his proper balance. All things looked to him sharp-edged and hot to the touch in the red light of the rising sun. Every man appeared swathed in a haze of a different hue. He felt becrazed.

He grinned through his pain to go along with the joke. He said he took revenge only against insults and although the savages had killed his companions and taken his scalp they had at least known better than to risk
insulting him. He grinned like a lunatic as Spooner translated for the compañeros who howled with glee and pointed at him and tottered like drunks in their laughter and some made “fuck you” gestures toward the Comancheria to the north. They nodded at each other and agreed that Eduardo was muy chistoso y muy simpático, these dark-skinned hot-eyed men shaped of the violent mix of pagan Indian blood with that of the carriers of the Spanish Cross. Their teeth flashed white under thick black mustaches and every man of them was scarred of face and hands. They were loud in talk and laughter, in curses and melancholy song. They bore weaponry of every sort—firearms and knives and machetes, and some carried lances and some wore cavalry sabers and all of them expert with lassos to take a man off his horse and drag him to raw meat behind their galloping mounts. Some carried scalps strung on their saddlehorns but even in his fever Edward noted that much of the hair was shot with gray and had been taken by unpracticed hands.

Dominguez the chieftain was a Poblano, a man of the city of Puebla, which lay far to the south some sixty-five miles beyond the capital and whose beauty he said could not adequately be described in the words of any language but that of the heart. At the age of fifteen he had concluded that it was unjust for someone so handsome and strong and smart as himself to be so poor while so many fat, weak, stupid men were so rich. So he set about righting the scales of justice and quickly progressed from preying on drunks in the late-night streets to robbing isolate travelers on the mountain roads to holding up stagecoaches along the main highways. He’d been at the robber’s trade six months when he got a price on his head for killing a diligence guard who refused to throw down the strongbox and grabbed instead for a shotgun. Other killings followed. When he was twenty-two he killed a famous bandit chief named Manolo Gomez in a knifefight in a cantina fronting Orizaba’s main plaza and then dragged the body outside and dismembered it with a machete and scattered the bloody pieces to the plaza dogs. By the time the sun went down the town balladeers had composed a song about the fight and would sing of it for generations to come. Dominguez’s reputation as a fearsome killer of men had thereafter grown swiftly.

He formed his own gang and over time it became the most notorious of the dozens of robber gangs ranging the high country between Mexico City and the Gulf, a region long infamous for banditry. The gangs became so rampant that no traveler or train of packmules or cargo wagons was safe from robbery along either of the two major highways between the
capital and Veracruz. The government assigned more and still more lancers to escort the wealthy merchants’ trains and to patrol the main roads. Soon the richest trains were routinely protected by entire regiments and were virtually unassailable. Judicial formalities had furthermore been much relaxed and men only suspected of banditry as well as known bandidos were often executed on the spot of arrest. Highway robbery became such perilous enterprise that Dominguez and his band departed to the northern badlands where there was easy money to be made killing Indians—or so they had heard.

That had been a year ago. And the money did not prove so easy. Dominguez’s trackers were unequal to the Apache and the gang never collected more than a dozen scalps at a time and most of the hair was of women and children and frail old men. Come autumn they were attacked by a huge war party in the Sierra del Hueso and of the gang’s fifty-two men only eighteen escaped with their lives. The survivors repaired to El Paso to tell of their harrowing adventure and drink and whore away the last of their money. There they heard that the American army had defeated the Mexican forces at Monterrey the month before and the gringos now occupied the city. The Yankee supply trains from the Rio Bravo into Nuevo León were said to be rich pickings for those with the balls to rob them.

Nuevo León was where the compañeros were headed when they spied the dust of the gringo mule train and then the greater dust of the savages closing upon it. The outriders came back at a gallop, wide-eyed and yelling of Comanches, and the gang sped to the refuge of the mountains and from there watched the dust of the Comanche attack on the gringo train. By evening the dust began to settle, and early the following morning the Indians resumed their northward trek for home. The compañeros held to their hiding place in the rocks and the next morning watched the Comanches pass by within a half-mile of their position, driving the stock before them, laughing and yipping, every brute of them coated with blackened blood and gore and their stink carrying into the mountain, many with scalps dangling from lances and some with blood-crusted heads strung from their ponies. Dominguez said they looked like devils heading home to hell. The compañeros waited the rest of that day and through the night to be sure they were well gone and at daybreak made ready to ride. But in the red light of sunrise they descried Edward’s distant figure slouching toward them like the incarnation of their own folly in having come to this wasteland to chase their fortune.

“You are very much lucky,” Dominguez said to Edward as they rode side by side. On Edward’s other side rode Pedro Arria, a hawkfaced man who had been with Dominguez since his earliest bandit days and was the company’s second in command. “All you friends they are died, but no you. Only you no die. Que buena suerte, hijito. Very much lucky, you.”

“Yeah,” Edward said. “I feel just awful damn lucky.”

Dominguez laughed.

His next days were hazed with fevered pain, his sleep haunted by visions from hell which he then would recognize as out of his own recent past. At the village of Boquillas they took a night’s respite. Pulque eased his suffering until morning and then heightened it with hangover, but his fever broke at last and some of the compañeros reluctantly paid off bets, arguing hopefully but without much conviction that the gringo might yet take a turn for the worse and die. The villagers thought him the most fearsome in the bunch because of his butchered head, the wound to his face where the cheekbone showed pale under the tight new growth of skin. Only the devil’s spawn, they whispered to one another, could survive such savage wounds. There was little tribute the gang could exact from the frighted inhabitants save dried meats and clean clothes. And then they rode on. That evening two of them fell into dispute over ownership of a shirt and knives came into play. The fight fell off when one staggered away into the dark with his hands holding in place his exposed intestines. The other sat down by a campfire, grinning in victory and clutching at his slashed neck as the blood ran blackly down his arm and fell in gleaming bulbous drops and hissed on the firestones and its vapor smelled sickly sweet. A few minutes later he let a gurgling sigh and slumped over and was dead. One of the compañeros removed this man’s boots and left his own worn ones there beside him and another took his pistol and knife but none made a move to bury him. A short while later they heard coyotes calling and drawing close in the night and then came the high howl of a wolf and the coyotes fell silent. In the morning they mounted up and hupped their horses to southeastward. A quarter-mile out on the hardpan they passed by the other one lying dead also, his abdomen hollowed of viscera. On a flanking ridge above them they spied a lone pale lobo looking down on their passing with its ears erect and its
muzzle stained darkly red, but no man among them even thought to shoot at this wolf or any other ever.

They rode up into the blood-colored Carmens and wound through juniper forests and past century plants with stalks double the height of their horses. His scalp was scabbing now and the pain of it lessened every day. Fredo Ruiz, a rarity of a hulking mestizo and the largest of the compañeros, presented him with a wide black bandanna and showed him how to tie it over his head like a pirate headpiece to protect his crown from curious eyes whenever he removed his hat.

Over the next weeks they rode through the high country and its steep passes and deep gorges, rode along narrow mountainside trails that looked out to the ends of the earth. They could see below them the outspread wings of hawks circling slowly on the hunt. They camped on tablerocks and the flames of their fires played drunkenly in the wind. Now and then in the depths of the desert night they could see the tiny winking lights of other fires, though whether of pilgrims or savages or denizens of another world none would hazard to guess.

They came down in single file through a sequence of deep barrancas and rocky switchbacks overhung with piñon and catclaw and mountain cypress. The air was wet and blued with mist. Occasionally there came from the shadowed high rock the screech of a cougar that raised the hair on their napes and frighted the horses. Riding through this mean country of stone and sand and thorn, Edward felt himself drawing toward a reckoning he could not bypass whatever road he took.

They debouched at last onto the bajada. The horizons shimmered at midday and icy winds gusted through their night camps and their fires swirled and lunged and trailed furious lines of sparks into the darkling void. They rode long days through spiny growths of sotol and ocotillo and lechugilla and in a dusky twilight blinking with fireflies came to the village of Nacimiento on Christmas Eve of 1846. Here they learned that in the past months more than two thousand Yankee soldiers under command of a general named Wool had marched down from the presidio at the Rio Bravo and crossed the river just forty miles ahead near the village of Sabinas. Their dust had been visible to the east for weeks. These gringo troops were now at Monclova seventy-five miles south and awaiting orders from Taylor in Monterrey. The compañeros listened to the news and feasted on cabrito and got drunk on mescal and several of them fought among themselves but none killed another and the combatants seemed the more refreshed afterwards despite their battered aspects. But tempers
stayed short through the evening and the air remained charged with ready violence. Dominguez sat with Pedro, Spooner and Edward at a table against the back wall of the little cantina and his own face sagged with drink. He watched his men and sighed and said they had to find somebody to rob soon or most of them would start killing each other out of boredom.

Just south of Sabinas they waylaid a passenger coach in a chilly drizzling rain. At the sight of them the two mounted guards threw down their weapons and raised their hands as did the guard beside the driver. The box contained two hundred pesos in silver, all else was contracts and deeds and various other papers of no use at all to the bandits. Dominguez ordered the passengers out of the coach and had a compañero named Chucho search them for weapons and valuables. One of the five passengers was a woman of passing attraction enfolded in a hooded cloak, the wife of a prosperously dressed man at her side. After Chucho searched the man and extracted a small purse bearing eighty pesos in gold coin, he turned to search the woman. But the husband stepped between them and told Chucho he most certainly could not put his hands on her. Chucho pulled his pistol and looked up at Dominguez sitting his horse. Dominguez told the man it would be best for him if he permitted his wife to be searched, but the man said absolutely not. Dominguez shrugged and turned to Edward and said, “Mátalo,” and made a shooting gesture with his thumb and index finger

He knew he should have expected it. Of course they would test him. Of course he would have to show he was of them. For a moment he thought of himself as one who had never killed in cold blood and then remembered some of the harmless Indians in whose slaughter he had joined. Still, those were Indians. This was an unarmed white man standing there and wanting only to protect his wife. He drew the Colt and pointed it at the man.

“Mira esa bonita pistola!” Dominguez said to Pedro Arria, admiring the five-shooter.

The man gently pushed his wife out of the line of fire, then glared up at Edward and said, “Crees que te tengo miedo, gringo? Nunca!
Nunca
, maldito!”

Edward cocked the weapon and sighted between the man’s eyes and wondered how he might explain if he chose not to shoot. It occurred to him all in an instant that it made no real difference whether he shot this man or not, just as it made no difference why he did so if he did. In time both he and this man would be dead and all trace of their existence long vanished. It would be as if neither had ever existed at all. And yet they
did
exist, both of them,
now
, and although a man might do what he did in his time of existence simply because it was in his blood to do it, he might sometimes have the choice of rejecting his blood’s urging. And so, at this moment, he could choose
not
to shoot.

What his choice of the moment would have been he would never know because just then the woman brought a small two-shot pistol from under her cloak and fired at him. Edward’s hat brim twitched and his horse shied and he shot her through the top teeth. In the same instant Fredo shot the husband. And then all of them were shooting and wrestling with their spooked mounts and every passenger fell down bloodied and some screamed in the gunfire and the thickening mist of powdersmoke. The two mounted guards reined their horses around to escape and Edward shot one down and Dominguez dropped the other. The guard on the coach fired with a pistol and one of the compañeros toppled from his horse and Edward shot the guard and blood jumped from his neck and he fell from the coach as the driver stood up with his hands held high but Fredo shot him too.

Now some of the bandidos dismounted and used knives to finish those of the coach party who still drew breath. The fallen compañero had been shot in the stomach and his shirt was brightly thick with blood. Pedro Arria was bent over him, examining the wound, and now he looked up at Dominguez and shook his head.

“No! No, jefe!” the wounded man cried up to Dominguez. “Estoy bien! Ya lo verás, jefe!” He grunted painfully with the effort of trying to rise and then fell back with a grimacing moan.

Dominguez motioned Pedro Arria out of the way and raised the spare caplock already cocked in his hand. He leaned forward from the saddle and aimed carefully and shot the wounded man through the eye.

They rifled the pockets and purses of the dead and some could not resist fondling the woman as they pretended to search her yet again lest the previous searchers missed something. A few among them would not have been above ravishing her before she cooled had not so many of their fellows been present. A young compañero named Gustavo who had once
studied in a seminary stood over the bodies and remarked aloud that it was interesting to see how the termination of these human lives now provided such abundant aliment for the ants and flies and the buzzards soon to appear. “De verdad nada se desperdicia en este mundo,” he said. “Todo lo que occure tiene algún resultado bueno.” His fellows smiled at his banalities with avuncular indulgence though some were ever wary of him as one who had been maddened by the conflict between his abiding reverence for God’s mysterious workings and his readiness to kill any of His creatures.

They took the guards’ weapons and freed the coach team from its traces and strung the horses on a pair of lead ropes. As they recharged their arms Dominguez offered Edward fifty silver dollars for the Colt. Edward said he would not sell it—and then presented it to the jefe as a gift. Dominguez was effusive with gratitude and in turn gave Edward three fine caplock pistols and a .50 caliber Hawken with a sawed-off barrel charged with two dollars in silver dimes.