In the Rogue Blood (43 page)

He trotted his mount up the Avenida Dolores, looking in the doorways of cantinas and shops and cafés as he passed. A string band was enter-went taining at the plaza at the end of the street and he turned left onto a side street and paced the horse slowly as he scanned the sidewalks and open doors, peered into every dark alleyway. He passed a church with a wall bearing the freshly painted exhortation, “¡Mueran los yanquis!” Some passersby glanced curiously at him and the saddled horse he led alongside but most paid him no mind.

A gunshot cracked somewhere in the near distance—and then another, and then two more. Some of the people hurriedly removed themselves from the street but most merely looked about and then went back to whatever they’d been doing. Gunfire in the capital had been more frequent than usual since the Yankees took occupation of the city and snipers were everywhere. Small skirmishes sometimes broke out in the crowded streets. But the capitalinos were long familiar with sudden public violence and most of them went on about their lives in much the same way as always.

He hupped his mount back to the plaza and crossed it to the next street and now spied a flock of Mexicans, some mounted but most on foot, rushing out from an alley two blocks away, a few glancing behind them as they turned onto the street and scattered. He spurred his horse forward and drew the black along and clattered into the alley and almost ran down some stragglers before he reined up. He spied the lighted doorway farther down the alley and faintly heard voices, laughter, shouts from within—then saw a handful of American soldiers come running out the door whooping and laughing.

They sped away down the alley in the other direction and then around the corner and were gone. He unholstered a Colt and put his horse forward and slowly advanced on the lighted door. When he hove to within a few yards of it he reined up and dismounted and hitched the two horses to a post. He drew the other Colt and with a pistol in each hand stepped up to the doorway.

John hung by the neck from a rope slung over a ceiling beam. Blood dripped from his boot toes, from his chin. He had wounds to his crotch and leg and one of his eyes was gone and a bullet hole showed red-black under his remaining and wide-open eye.

There was no one else in the room. Edward sat at a table and stared up at his brother and thought of nothing and felt as if his chest were utterly hollowed.

After a time he got up and cut him down. Then he went out to the black stallion and took the Spy Company coatee from its wallets and went
back inside the tavern and stripped John of his Mexican jacket and put the coatee on him. He went to the bar and poured himself a drink and drank it and then went back to John and carried him outside and heaved him belly-down over the black’s saddle and securely tied him in place. He put a Spy Company black hat on him and snugged the tie tightly under his chin. Then he went back in the cantina and retrieved two full bottles of tequila and stuffed them in his wallets and mounted up, and hupped the horses out to the street.

People on the sidewalks stared as he went by, stared and whispered to one another and pointed after him.

He rode through the city and encountered no army patrols either horsed or on foot until he came to the pickets at the north end of the Tlalnepantla causeway. He told the officer in charge that the dead man was a comrade who’d been killed not an hour ago by a goddamned Mexican sniper and he was taking him back to their unit’s reconnaissance camp near Pachuca so Colonel Dominguez could decide where to bury him. The officer expressed his condolences and cursed the Mexican snipers for the cowardly bastards they were and waved Edward past.

He rode at a canter all that night and all the next day over the tableland between towering violet ranges to east and west. He slept in the saddle, pausing only to water the animals. He thought on little but the physical world about him. The skies drew his intent reflection, the shifting clouds. He studied distant rainstorms trailing across the horizon like mysterious purple veils.

The following day he angled northwestward into the brown foothills and then through a steepwalled canyon where the light was dimly blue and the horses’ hooves echoed like hammered anvils. He put down in a clearing ringed by junipers and catclaw, nearly numbed with exhaustion. A cold wind whistled in the rocks and his campfire lunged and twisted frantically as if in mute agony with its own burning. A baleful yellow eye of moon fixed narrowly on this hard dark world below. He wondered about the origins of comets streaking across the black void and wondered too where their fires did extinguish. He woke before dawn to find a sidewinder coiled beside him. The snake’s eyes might have been fixed on his or might have been staring at some inner vision forever the secret of
snakes. He closed his eyes and slept again and when he next awoke the snake was gone.

He was in the saddle before daybreak and followed trails made by no man before him, winding routes formed by runoff and rockslide and the passings of wild animals, cutting through the thorny growth so narrowly in places that his clothes were soon rent to rags and he and the animals streaked bloody with deep scratches. The going grew tenuous as they ascended. The horses shrilled and laid their ears back as they struggled for purchase and moved forward in lunges and yaws and loosed great clattering slides of rock behind them. The next sunrise found him on a climbing siderock trail jutting from a sheer rock wall and barely wide enough to accommodate the horses before dropping away into misty nothingness.

He came that afternoon around a long curve in the mountainside and arrived at a broad clearing overlooking a vast and darkly dappled bolsón that lay a half-mile below like a roughly tattered rug all the way to the blue-misted northern rim of the world. The clearing was shaded by a growth of pines and water trickled from a fissure in the rockwall and issued into a small pool. He let the horses drink and then bent to sate his own thirst and gave a momentary start at his reflection on the water’s surface. He found that the ground to one side of the pool and at the base of the rockwall was soft enough to be dug up with knife and hands. He sat on his heels and considered. Then looked to the black horse where the body of his brother yet carried. Then looked for a time out to the vista below. Then set to work with the bowie and his hands and dug quickly and easily until he had fashioned a shallow grave. And there he laid the mortal remains of his brother, John Jackson Little.

He set his hat over John’s face and then covered him over with dirt and tamped down the soft earth and then sought out heavy rocks he could barely heft in both arms and he grunted with the effort of carrying them to the grave and positioning them on top of it. And when he had covered the entire grave with stone to keep the scavengers from his brother he retrieved a bottle from his saddle wallet and took several deep swallows of tequila. He sat down crosslegged at the rockrim and looked out in the closing twilight at the vast and hazed horizon to the north where their home country lay in the mists.

Long low reefs of clouds burned redly to the west. And now, without turning to the grave behind him, he addressed his brother. Told him he was sorry. For everything. Sorry for their mother and their daddy and
their little sister. Sorry for being a no-good brother. Sorry for deserting him in New Orleans and now in Mexico. Sorry for not even getting him to that part of Mexico where Maggie now lay.

“It’s the wrong country, bubba, but leastways you both in the same one.” He took another deep drink. “Hell, boy, I would of had to sleep sometime. The wolves would of had at you while I did. The damn coyotes. You know it’s true.”

He looked off toward the faraway end of the world. “Sorry,” he said, “is all in the hell I am.”

In the gathering darkness he looked out upon the empty waste and could feel the world spinning under him as it had been spinning since before time was measured and as it would spin long after time ceased to exist for lack of anyone to mark its passing. A lone wolf howled in the timber.

“Hell, bud, I hate to say it right out, but you’da started rotting pretty bad before too much longer. I expect you’da pretty soon been dropping off in pieces ever coupla miles. Being in pieces all over this damn Mexicio—
that’d
be a hell of lot worse than buried up here all in one piece. You know that’s true too.”

And then as he took another drink he was abruptly moved to laughter and the tequila came up through his nose in a fiery gush and he choked and his eyes flooded.

Gasping, he turned to the grave and said, “God damn, bud—you’da been ate by crows and buzzards and vultures, and Lord knows that’s plenty bad and shameful enough, but it aint the worst of it, no sir. The
worst
of it is they’da soon enough shit you out again!”

He threw his head back and laughed with all his teeth. Thumped his fist on his thigh and swayed and snorted and snuffled with laughter. The horses turned to see what affliction had befallen him and the alarm he perceived in their shadowed faces made him laugh the harder. His jaws ached with his laughter, his belly cramped. His eyes burned.

And then suddenly he let a piercing keen and was crying. Weeping without restraint. Wracked with great fierce sobs that shook him to his bones.

He drew his knees up to his chest and hugged them tight against himself and rocked back and forth like a child and wailed his grief with all the heart left to him.

And his wails echoed off the rockwalls down in the empty canyons and carried out to the wasteland and faded in the darkling void.

James Carlos Blake
was born in Mexico and raised in Texas and Florida. His short fiction has won awards and appeared in a variety of literary journals. He is the author of
The Pistoleer; The Friends of Pancho Villa
, and
Red Grass River
. He lives in El Paso, Texas, and DeLand, Forida.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

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Copyright © 1997 by James Carlos Blake
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EPub Edition © AUGUST 2012 ISBN: 978-0-062-22784-3

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:

Blake, James Carlos.

In the rogue blood / James Carlos Blake.

p. cm.

1. Frontier and pioneer life—Mexican-American Border Region—Fiction. 2. Mexican-American Border Region—History—Fiction. I. Title.

First Perennial Books Trade Paperback Printing: October 1998
First Perennial Books Hardcover Printing: September 1997

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