In the Rogue Blood (34 page)

“I be damn,” Spooner said, looking on her closely. “I believe I know this little thing. Sported with her in a Galveston house about a year ago or I’m a striped-ass ape. I gotta say she looked a sight bettern now. Drank like a fish but a load of fun. Hell, I went to that same house three nights in a row for the pleasure of her. I tell you I knew this gal real good but bedamn if I recall her name.”

“Margaret,” Edward murmured. And thought:
She lied, she lied!

“No,” Spooner said, staring hard at the wasted girl, “that aint it. Jeannie … Janey … Julie, more like, somethin like that.”

Goddamn crazy bitch. I knew she lied and she did and oh sweet Jesus look what’s come of it, just look. Because she lied, she lied, she lied…
.

Her gaze held on Edward at her side and her eyes glimmered wetly. She made as if she would raise her hand to him but the pain of the effort was evident on her face and she groaned and let a long breath and closed her eyes. Edward clutched her hand and raised it to his lips and held it there.

“Hey pardner,” Spooner said, puzzled and unsure if he should be amused. “What the hell’s this?”

Edward did not say anything nor look at him.

Spooner watched him for a long moment, then said, “Hey, Eddie,” in a different voice. Edward kept his gaze on the girl, kept her hand to his lips. A while later Spooner went away.

After a time the girl opened her eyes again and looked at him and her hand pressed against his mouth with no more strength than that of a baby bird. She tried to speak but could form only a small rasp. Her breath labored. She worked her blackened tongue over her lips and tried again. “What they …
done
… to you.” Her eyes brimmed and tears cut thin pale tracks down the sides of her face.

His throat felt as though hands were seized hard on it. Her face wavered and he brushed at his eyes to clear them. His hand tighted on hers but he immediately eased his hold for fear he’d break the bones of it.

“Ward,” she rasped. “Ward.” Her fingers applied the barest pressure to his lips and then her eyes again closed.

He watched the rise and fall of her breasts and would never in the rest of his life remember what he was thinking then or if he was thinking anything at all. The western sky was afire with the remains of the day. Two compañeros came and carried off the other girl. Dominguez appeared in the twilight and sat beside him without speaking. After a time he got up and left.

Darkness rose over the country. He became vaguely aware of a campfire flaming near the lead wagon and of the movements of shadows and silhouettes. He smelled food and heard low voices and the soft singing of a compañero. Then again came shrieks of women, most now sounding more of pleasure than of pain.

He wondered if she would open her eyes again. He would not know
it in the dark. He thought of fetching a torch to stick in the sand beside her so he could see her face but decided against it because he did not want to be away from her for even a second while she yet lived, nor did he want anyone else to look on her. Because he now could not see if she was breathing he placed his fingers to her parted lips and felt there her vague warm exhalations. He felt her breath become fainter until he felt it barely at all and then he did not feel it but kept his fingers on her lips for a time longer until he felt them cooling and knew she was dead.

At first light he took off his shirt and covered her nakedness and went to the lead wagon and there found a spade and used it to dig her grave at the foot of a sand rise some fifty yards away. Fredo and Spooner came to ask if they might help but he did not speak nor look at them and they withdrew. When the hole was deep enough to defy the scavengers the sky was burning red over the distant eastern range. He went to the wagon and picked her up and cradled her spare flesh against his chest and breathed deeply the entire mortal truth of her. Then he carried her to the grave and placed her in it and buried her. Then he went about gathering large rocks and when he had covered the grave with them he was done.

He had thought to ask among the whores what they knew of her, where she’d been and what she’d been doing and what she’d talked of, but then decided it was folly. He had seen what there was to know, seen it in the dying light of the day before, seen it and smelled it and felt it under his fingers and buried it this sunrise. What else was there to know that mattered?

The whores were standing around the smoky remains of the campfire, dressed now and hugging themselves against the morning chill and all of them watching the compañeros add the wagon mules to their string. Some of the girls asked how they were supposed to get out of there without mules to ride but no man paid them heed.

None of his fellows questioned him then or later about the girl. Dominguez gave him a shirt to wear and Chucho brought him his saddled horse. He mounted up and looked back once at the cairn he’d erected in that lonely waste and then hupped his mount forward and rode away with his compañeros.

That night and on many to follow he dreamt of her. Saw her laughing on the porch back home and putting her legs up on the railing and letting him and his brother see up her dress all the way to her cotton under-drawers. She was smiling wickedly and then reaching down and ruffling his brother’s hair with her hand and his brother flushed and quickly ran
the back of his hand along the underside of her leg and then snatched his hand away and blushed even more furiously.

And he dreamt too of Daddyjack, of course. Who pointed at Maggie and grinned at him and cackled, “I
tole
ye blood always finds blood! I
tole
ye!”

They rode the passes up into the Sierras de Tamaulipas and descended the eastern slope on the pine forest switchbacks and debouched onto the tierra caliente of the gulf coast plain. The air turned moistly heavy and smelled of salt and swampland. In the port city of Tampico they saw American soldiers and sailors everywhere who looked with suspicion on them and their half-wild ponies and rank aspects and clattering array of arms but none did confront them. Marimba music plunked and tinkled in every plaza. They entered a restaurant from which their mien and reek drove away a good portion of the patrons. A quartet of nervous policemen came in and sat at a doorside table and watched them noisily gorge on crab legs and shellfish and turtle steaks. When the gang had done with its supper it trooped out with its armament aclatter and hardly a glance at the police who kept their seats. They went to a bagnio overlooking the harbor and they bathed in large tin tubs and every tub was left with a thick and sudsy pink-gray surface of bloody filth. And then they each of them repaired to a room in the company of a girl.

Edward was attended by a young mestiza who did not seem bothered by his scarred face but she went pale when he exposed his mutilated crown so he put the bandanna back on. Her skin was smooth and honey-colored, her eyes black as a night of rain. She smelled of damp grass and earth.

She was astraddle him and working her hips smoothly when a man in the white cotton clothes of a peón crashed through the door and screeched “Puta!” and slashed at her with a machete. He hacked at her upraised arms and at her shoulders and blood flew to the walls and even through the girl’s screams Edward heard the machete striking bone as he struggled to get out from under her and clear of the bed. The blade clove her neck and blood fountained to the ceiling and then Edward was on him and twisting his arm and the machete clattered to the floor. He beat the man to his knees and snatched up the machete and stanced himself to swat
off his head but was set upon from behind by several men who wrested the weapon from his grasp and pinioned his arms behind him. A jabbering crowd was now at the door of the tiny room and Dominguez appeared and barked an order and Edward was instantly released.

Blood dripped from the ceiling and streaked the walls and slicked the floor and soaked the bed where the girl lay nearly decapitated with her dead eyes open wide. The killer was sobbing as he was taken away by policemen. And now Edward learned that the girl was a newcomer to the trade who had been working in the house but a few weeks and the man who killed her was her brother. He had shown up three days ago to take her back to their family’s village in the hills but she’d refused to go. When he tried to drag her out, the house guardian had evicted him bodily. He’d since been drinking in the neighborhood cantinas and holding muttered conversations with himself and seemed at a loss about what to do. Today he’d made up his mind.

They ascended the Sierra Madre and entered cold blue clouds that made ghost figures of the trees. The trail narrowed as it rose. The steep rock facings were dark and slick. They rode single file with their rifles across their pommels and spoke hardly at all for days, their mounts’ hooves clacking on stone, bits chinking, saddles creaking. Birds whistled and flew from the trees and deer bounded across the trail and small creatures rustled in the brush. The sundown sky looked like marbled, freshly butchered meat. Timber wolves howled like woeful souls.

They met one forenoon with a pack train bound from Pachuca for the coast. The lead rider reined up and grinned at them and took off his sombrero and shielded his belt pistol with it. Dominguez did not wait to see if he was going for his gun but simply pulled his Colt and shot him in the face. The man tumbled from the saddle and rolled off the trail and plunged into misty space and the other guards were still unslinging their rifles as the gang gunned them down in a thunderous enfilade that echoed down the canyon walls. They killed too all the muleteers but for three who escaped into the forest. The compañeros made away with satchels of freshly-minted silver specie and fifty mules loaded with coffee. The animals and the cargo they sold to a broker in Tulancingo who asked no questions.

They resumed the sierra trail and rode downcountry without haste. A week later a Mexican army patrol came wending up the mountainside behind them. They set up an ambush on either side of a narrow pass and caught the patrol in a crossfire and put down more than half the cavalrymen before the rest were able to retreat. They gathered up the fallen soldiers’ mounts and weapons and then rode on toward Jalapa. A few miles north of that town they met with a guerrilla chieftain, a ranchero named Lucero Carbajal whom Dominguez had known since boyhood, and they sold the mules and all their extra horses and guns to him and then took supper in his camp.

Dominguez wanted to visit Jalapa, a lovely place of gardens and orange trees and weather unsurpassably fine. But Carbajal warned him away from there. A month earlier General Scott’s army had crushed Santa Ana’s troops in a ferocious battle at Cerro Gordo, some fifteen miles southwest of Jalapa, and sent the broken Mexican ranks running for their lives. The Napoleon of the West himself had fled the field on his pegleg and was said to have finally arrived at Orizaba and begun to reorganize his army for the defense of Mexico City. Scott’s army was now ensconced in both Jalapa and Puebla and all the talk in the cantinas was of the gringos’ preparation to begin their move on the capital. The only real resistance the gringos faced between Puebla and Mexico City, Carbajal said, was that of the ranchero bands led by such as himself, Padre Colombo Bermejillo, Anastasio Torrejón and José Miñon. They had each been harassing the Yankees with hit-and-run raids on their supply trains and with sniper attacks on their columns. They regularly trailed the gringo patrols and killed the stragglers and mutilated their remains in order to frighten their comrades who found them. But despite the rancheros’ continuing guerrilla raids, the American victory at Cerro Gordo had cleared their route to Mexico City and the war was sure to reach the capital soon.

The Yankees weren’t the only problem, Carbajal said. The alcaldes of Jalapa and Pueblo had told the gringo commanders that most of the local ranchero gangs were nothing but bandidos looking to enrich themselves under the banner of patriotism. The bastards had given the gringos a list of names. They were all on that list, Carbajal said angrily—himself, Dominguez, Bermejillo, Torrejón, everybody. He knew the local people hated them for bandits and wanted to see them all dead or at least behind bars but he’d never thought they hated bandits so much they’d turn to the goddamned Yankees for help. Dominguez smiled over the rim of his tequila cup and said it surely was amazing that some people could hate
a bandit just because he robbed and killed a few of their friends and neighbors every now and then. Carbajal grinned back at him and shrugged. He said the locals knew Dominguez and his gang were back in the region because two surviving muleteers of the Pachuca pack train had brought back the tale of the robbery and of the killings of the guards and the other drovers. It was widely supposed that Dominguez was headed back to his native city and both the local police and the Yankee army were on the lookout for him. It would be unwise to show his face in Jalapa, Carbajal told him, and even riskier to appear in Puebla.

Dominguez shrugged and thanked him for the information and advice and then they passed out bottles to their compañeros and there ensued an evening of drinking and singing and the two chieftains told stories of the old days when they were boys just starting out as bandits. And before daybreak Dominguez and his gang were mounted and on their way.

They came through a high pass and into view of Puebla on a bright late afternoon and sat their horses on a high ridge overlooking the city and listened to the tolling of church bells. Dominguez sighed and said, “Ay, que linda ciudad!” Beyond the city’s perimeter rose the presidio of Loreto with the American flag fluttering over its gates and some few of the compañeros cursed through their teeth but most were as indifferent to one flag as another and shrugged at their fellows’ ire. Dominguez put his mount forward onto the downward trail and the company followed after.

It was Mexico’s second largest city and the tidiest Edward would see in his life. The streets were perfectly-paved with cobblestone and shaded by trees. In every plaza there stood churches and convents ornately trimmed with colorful glazed tiles. In the central plaza loomed the imposing Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception built by the Spaniards two hundred years before. It was Sunday midday and the last masses of the morning had just finished. The streets and squares were thronged with people in their finery and priests and nuns in flowing black robes and habits. Fredo Ruiz, who detested the Catholic Church as a personal enemy, looked about at the multitude of clerics and spat. “La Roma de Mexico,” he growled.

The plazas sparkled with fountains and were lively with musical bands and fireaters and jugglers and clowns from the local circus. There were
street vendors of fresh fruit and tamales and charcoaled meats and gimcrackery. Patrons crowded the arcade shops and cafes. And everywhere they saw Yankee soldiers, most of them strolling wide-eyed with wonder at the city’s ancient beauty and agape at the lovely girls who smiled at them over their lace fans as they were hurried along by scowling dueñas. The Yankees paid the gang no mind, but in the shadows of the arcades were some who watched intently as the compañeros passed by and they recognized the bandit Dominguez and some of the other riders as well and made visual inventory of their weapons. And then they followed at a distance.

They boarded their mounts in a livery off the main plaza and there washed themselves thoroughly and then bought new clothes at a haberdasher’s and had themselves barbered and pomaded and shaved and powdered. Their longarms they stored with their horses but those who were following and watching took notice that every man of them wore a pair of Colts under his coat. They sat for dinner at a banquet table in a fine restaurant where Dominguez several times had to hiss at some of the less urbane of his fellows about their faulty manners. They attracted much sidelong and murmuring attention from the surrounding tables and many of the compañeros were pleased by it, but not Edward, who felt most of the attention was of the sort one saw at a zoo and most of it was directed at him for the bandanna on his head. He was tempted to remove it and really give the gawkers something to whisper about but he checked the impulse.

They next repaired to the corrida and bought seats in the shade and drank beer and cheered those matadors who braved the bulls’ horns most daringly and artfully and cheered too the bulls who fought and died well. They ridiculed and cursed those few matadors whose ineptness or fear made for an awkward show and was taken as insulting to a noble bull. Several among the compañeros joined other disgusted aficionados in tossing cupfuls of piss down upon these disgraces to the matador’s art. It was Edward’s first witness of the corrida’s pageantry and blood rituals, and the good fights stirred him in a way he had not felt since his young boyhood in Georgia when he saw Daddyjack stab Tom Rainey dead. Each time he shouted “Ole!” in unison with the crowd as the bull lunged at the matador’s swirling cape and its horns brushed the front of his spangled jacket he felt a tight excitement all the way down to his balls.

Exiting the plaza de toros into the encroaching twilight of early evening the compañeros were all mildly drunk and eager for women. Dominguez
said La Mariposa was the best house in the city, but Pedro Arria, who was also a Poblano, believed Las Flores Picantes was a better place. Half the boys wanted to go to the one and half to the other. Dominguez said he would meet them all the following afternoon in the main plaza and then headed off by himself.

“Where’s
he
off to?” Edward asked Spooner.

“See his wife, most likely,” Spooner said. He laughed at the look on Edward’s face. “Hell, boy, ole Manuel’s been married since before I met him. Bout four years, I believe. Name’s Laura. I aint seen her myself, but some of the boys have, and they say she’s a right beauty. Know what his great sorrow is? Him and his wife? They aint got no kids. Tells me they try like hell ever time he comes home but they just aint had no luck that way.”

Spooner went off with Pedro and his group to do their sporting in Las Flores and Edward and Chucho and the rest made their way toward La Mariposa. As they passed the lamplit main plaza they paused to admire the pretty girls promenading in the company of their dueñas at the evening paseo. A brass band played merrily as the women strolled about the perimeter of the plaza in one direction while the men circled in the other, smiling and giving each other appraising looks as they passed. The moon showed bright white through the trees. “Andale,” Chucho said after a minute. “Estas hermosas me tienen de rabia por una mujer. Vamonos!” They left the plaza and went another two blocks and turned down a long and darkened alleyway and arrived at La Mariposa.