“I wish we had old Buffalo Hump here,” he said. “I expect he’d think this was a pretty fancy torture.”
Therese, undeterred, sat him down again and applied the tweezers until his nose was plucked clean of hairs.
Later, when they were all cleaned up enough to look almost as respectable as Xavier Wanz’s tablecloth, Therese proved that she was as skilled a cook as she was a barber. A sizable flock of half-wild chickens chirped amid the crumbling adobe huts. Therese snatched four of them, collected a great number of eggs, and made them all a feast which included potatoes. The men ate so much they could scarcely stumble off the floor of the saloon-to-be, where the feast had been served on a folding table Xavier had produced from under the wagon sheet.
“If people knew they could get fed like this, Lonesome Dove would be a town in no time,” Gus said. “I wouldn’t mind moving here myself. It would save the expense of all that high-priced Austin liquor.”
“Yes, but what would you do for cash?” Call asked. “It’s fine eating, but there’d be no one to pay you a wage.”
Therese had put two candles on the folding table. Other than their flickering light, the only illumination came from the high moon.
“Captain King expects there’ll be businesses here someday, because of the fine river crossing,” Gus said. “If there’s businesses here, I guess we could have one too.”
“Speak for yourself,” Call said. “I’m a Texas Ranger and I aim to stay one.”
“Now that’s a damn boresome point of view,” Gus said. “Just because we started out being rangers don’t mean we have to stay rangers all our lives. The army will whip out the Indians in a few more years and there won’t be much to do, anyway.”
“Maybe, but there’s plenty to do right now,” Call said.
“Mr. Xavier, now he’s a curious fellow,” Gus said. “He’s been standing behind that bar all day and he’s still standing behind it.”
Call looked. Sure enough, Xavier still held his position behind the long bar, although all the rangers had either fallen asleep or left the floor of the saloon.
“Between the barbering and the liquor they made a pretty penny on us today,” Call said. “I expect they’ll soon prosper.”
The two of them strolled away from the unbuilt saloon and the camp where their comrades slept, and meandered toward the river. They heard the water before they saw it, and, when they did see it, it was only the flicker of moonlight here and there on the surface.
“Lonesome Dove will need a whore or two, otherwise it won’t grow,” Augustus allowed. “Prosperous businessmen won’t long tolerate the absence of whores.”
“You can’t tolerate it, you mean,” Call said. “That’s one reason you’ll never be a prosperous businessman.”
“Well, I just wasn’t meant to work at one trade all my life,” Augustus said. “I’m too fond of variety.”
“If you like variety I don’t see how you can beat rangering,” Call said. “A month ago we were freezing on the plains, trying not to get scalped, and now we’re off to Mexico, where we’ll be hot and probably get shot.”
“Is the Captain sending the cattle?” Gus asked. “If he is, I hope they don’t come for a day or two. A little more of that woman’s cooking might improve my cowboying.”
“He’s not sending the cattle—no interest,” Call said.
“No interest?” Gus said, astonished. “No cattle? What are we going to do, Woodrow?”
They both stood looking across the river, at Mexico, the dark country.
“Maybe the Captain’s already escaped,” Gus said. “He’s sly, the Captain. He could be halfway home by now.”
“He might be halfway dead, too,” Call pointed out.
“If we can’t raise the cattle, what do we do?” Augustus asked. “Go after him anyway, or give up again?”
“You’re a captain, same as I am,” Call said. “What do you want to do? The two of us might go in alone and sneak him out.”
“Why, yes, and pigs might cuss,” Gus said. “What’ll happen is we’ll get caught too—and the state of Texas won’t bother sending no expedition after us.”
Still, once he thought about it, something about the adventure of trying to rescue Captain Scull appealed to him, and the thought of a herd of cattle did not.
“It’s getting to be the fly season, Woodrow,” Gus said.
Call waited. Augustus didn’t elaborate.
“What’s your point?” Call asked, finally. “We can’t stop the seasons from turning.”
“No, but we could avoid cattle during the fly season,” Gus said. “A thousand cattle would attract at least a million flies, which is more flies than I care to swat.”
“We don’t have them anyway,” Call said. “And if Captain King won’t give them to us, nobody will. Anyway, he’s right. We could no more drive a thousand cattle across Mexico than we could a thousand jackrabbits.”
“That’s right, we ain’t vaqueros,” Gus said.
The two of them fell silent, looking across to Mexico. Though they quarreled frequently, they were often tugged by the same impulses, and so it was at that moment by the slow river. The longer they looked across it, the more strongly they felt the urge to attempt their mission alone—without cattle and without the other men.
“We could just do it, Woodrow—the two of us,” Augustus said. “We’d have a better chance than if we take the cattle or the troop.”
Call agreed.
“I’m game if you are,” he said. “I think it’s about time we made something of ourselves, anyway.”
“I’d just like to travel with less company, myself,” Gus said. “I don’t know about making something of ourselves.”
“Buffalo Hump’s held the plains ever since we’ve been rangers,” Call pointed out. “We’ve never whipped him. And Ahumado’s held the border—we’ve never whipped him either. We can’t protect the plains or the border either—that’s poor work in my book.”
“Woodrow, you’re the worst I’ve ever known for criticizing yourself,” Gus said. “We’ve never rangered with more than a dozen men at a time. Nobody could whip Buffalo Hump or Ahumado with a dozen men.”
Call knew that was true, but it didn’t change his feeling. The Texas Rangers were supposed to protect settlers on the frontier, but they hadn’t. The recent massacres were evidence enough that they weren’t succeeding on their job.
“You ought to give up and open a store, if you feel that low about it,” Augustus suggested. “There’s a need for a store, now that the Forsythes are dead. You could marry Mag while you’re at it and be comfortable.”
“I don’t want to run a store or marry either,” Call said. “I’d just like to feel that I’m worth the money I’m paid.”
“No, what you want is to take a big scalp,” Gus said. “Buffalo Hump’s or Ahumado’s. That’s what you want. Me, I’d take the scalp too, but I don’t figure it would change much.”
“If you kill the jefe it might change something,” Call argued.
“No, because somebody else just as mean will soon come along,” Gus said.
“Well, we rarely agree,” Call said.
“No, but let’s go to Mexico anyway,” Augustus said. “I’m restless. Let’s just saddle up and go tonight. There’s a fine moon. Without the boys to slow us down we could make forty miles by morning.”
Call felt tempted. He and Augustus at least knew one another’s competencies. They would probably fare better alone.
“What’s your hurry?” he asked Gus. “Why tonight?”
“If I stay around I expect that Frenchwoman might fall in love with me,” Gus said. “Her husband might fight me—it’d be a pity to get blood on that nice tablecloth.”
“Do you suppose the boys can find their way back to Austin, if we leave?” Call asked.
“Ikey Ripple claims to have never been lost,” Augustus reminded him. “I expect it’s a boast, but I think we should put him to the test. If the other boys don’t want
to try it with Ikey, they can stay and help build the saloon. The town would grow quicker if they had a saloon that didn’t expose you to the weather—if the saloon had a roof and there was a whore or two and a livery stable, Lonesome Dove might be a place somebody might want to live.”
“The boys will be right surprised, when they wake up and find us gone,” Call said.
“A little startlement would be better than being caught by Ahumado,” Gus pointed out. “From what I’ve heard, he ain’t gentle.”
The white moon soared over Mexico. The longer the two men looked, the stronger beckoning they felt from the unknown land.
“If we had cattle I’d try it the way we were supposed to,” Call said. “But the fact is we don’t.”
When they got back to the saloon the two candles had been blown out and the Wanzes had retired to their tent.
“I doubt that tent really belonged to Napoleon,” Call said. “He was the emperor. Why would he give it up?”
“He might have just liked Therese, if he’d met her,” Augustus said. “I like her myself, even if she did pull hairs out of my nose.”
Deets was the only man awake when the two of them were saddling their horses and selecting a few provisions. At first he supposed the two captains were just going off on a scout; when Call came over and informed him that they were going to try and rescue Captain Scull themselves, Deets’s eyes grew wide. He knew it was not his place to question the action of his two captains, but he could not entirely suppress his apprehension.
“We way down here in the brush,” he said.
It wasn’t that Deets felt exactly lost—it was just that he didn’t feel exactly safe. The big Indian with the hump might come—or, if not him, someone just as bad.
Call felt a little guilty as he gathered up his gear. He was usually the one impatient to leave, but this time it was Augustus who was in a sweat to get started. Call felt he ought to wake up one or two of the men and let them know what was happening, but Augustus argued against it.
“These men have been drinking ever since we got here,” he pointed out. “They’re drunk and they’re asleep—let’s just go. They ain’t new calves, they’re grown men. I doubt we’ll be gone more than a few days. If they don’t want to head back to Austin, they can stay here and wait for us.”
Several loud snores could be heard, as they talked.
Call felt that they ought to leave instructions, but again Gus protested.
“You don’t always have to be telling people every single thing to do, Woodrow,” he complained. “They need to work up some independence anyway. If we wake ’em up they might quarrel and start punching one another.”
“All right,” Call said. It didn’t feel quite right, but there was logic in what Gus said.
Pea Eye woke up, as the two captains talked. He saw them mount and ride out of camp; in a minute or two he heard their horses take the river. But it was not an unusual thing. Captain Call particularly often rode off at night, to scout a little. Pea Eye supposed it was no more than that, and went back to sleep.
44.
WHEN AHUMADO SAW the small hole in his leg, with the little ring of rot around it, he knew that Parrot had been at work. Parrot had sent the small brown spider who hides to bite him; when he first saw the hole, which was in the lower part of his leg, he was surprised. He had always been respectful of Parrot, as he had of Jaguar. It was hard to know why Parrot would have the Spider-Who-Hides bite him—but the evidence was there. When Ahumado bent over he could smell the rot, and he knew it would get worse. Soon he might have no leg; he might merely have a bone where the leg had been. The flesh of his leg would rot and turn black. Parrot liked to joke—what had happened might only be Parrot’s joke. Parrot was older than humans, and had no respect for them. He was capable of complicated jokes, too. The whites had always called Ahumado the Black Vaquero, despite the fact that he had no interest in cows. He only bothered taking them to annoy the Texans, who prized cows highly. He didn’t like horses, either, except to eat, yet the whites considered him a great horsethief, though he only stole horses to trade them for slaves. Still, all the whites called him the Black Vaquero. Parrot knew such things—so now Parrot had sent Spider-Who-Hides to make his leg black. It was one of Parrot’s jokes, probably. The Black Vaquero would at least have a black leg.
Ahumado did not reveal his injury to anyone. He sat on his blanket, as he always did, watching the great vultures soar across the face of the Yellow Cliffs. There were fewer vultures now, because Ahumado had stopped hanging men in the cages, men the vultures could eat. Only a few of the vultures, or the eagles, still flew along the cliff, waiting to see if Ahumado would cage a man for them to eat.
Ahumado sat as he had always sat, listening, saying little. The wound in his leg was very small yet; no one had noticed it, or smelled the rot that would soon spread. Once he had thought the matter over for a day or two, Ahumado realized that it was more than just one of Parrot’s jokes. Parrot had sent Spider to call him home; Parrot and Jaguar wanted him to leave the Yellow Cliffs, to stop harrying the whites with their thin cattle; Parrot and Jaguar wanted him to return to his home, to the jungle, where great serpents rested in the vine-covered temples. There was a broad tree near one of the temples, a tree with a great hole in it. Lightning had hit the tree and burned it away inside, so that there was a space in the tree large enough for a person to live in. When Ahumado was young an old woman had lived in the tree: her name was Huatl and she was a great curandera, so great that she could even cure the bite of the Spider-Who-Hides. In his youth Ahumado had often seen old Huatl; she lived in the split tree, near his home. She had told him that he would live long but that in his old age it would be his duty to return to the place of the split tree. When it was time for him to finish with his life as a human being, he was to lie near the tree with the hole in it; then he would sink into the earth and become a root. Lightning would come again and burn the great tree where Huatl lived. That tree would burn up but another tree would grow from the root that had once been the man Ahumado. That tree would live for a thousand years and become the tree of medicines. The people would come in their weakness or illness to the tree of medicines and be cured. In that tree would be all knowledge, all that Huatl and all the other great healers knew.
For three days Ahumado watched the tiny hole in his leg become larger; he watched as the ring of rot spread. On the third day he heard a sound deep in his ear and looked up to see Parrot fly like a red streak across the face of the cliff. He thought the sound in his ear was from Jaguar, who was somewhere near.
Ahumado knew then that he had been summoned. He was spending his last day in the canyon of the Yellow Cliffs. None of the people in the camp knew this, of course. The women went on with their work, washing clothes in the stream and making tortillas. The men played cards, drank tequila, quarreled over dice, and tried to get the women to couple with them. Scull crouched in his cage, sheltering his lidless eyes from the sun. It was hundreds of miles to the jungle, to the place of temples. Ahumado knew he had better get started. He wanted to get across the first mountains before his leg became too bad. He knew that by the time he reached the home of Jaguar he would have no leg. He meant to take a good hatchet with him, so he could make himself a crutch when his leg failed. That night he would crawl through a hole that only he knew about—the hole would take him through the belly of the cliff; it would take him past the dark men. He told no one; he would merely vanish—in the morning there would be no Ahumado. He would travel over rocks and leave no track. None of the people would know where he went. He would simply be gone.
There was only one thing left for Ahumado to do, in the canyon of the Yellow Cliffs, and it involved old Goyeto, the skinner.
“Sharpen your knives,” he told Goyeto. “You had better get them as sharp as you can. They need to be very sharp today.”
Goyeto brightened, when he received those instructions. They had taken no captives lately; there had been no one to skin. But now Ahu
mado wanted him to make the knives sharp. He wanted the knives to be very sharp. It must mean that he had at last decided to let him skin the white man, Scull. There was no one else who was a candidate for skinning.
So Goyeto set about to make his little knives sharp—while Ahumado sat on his blanket, Goyeto whetted his knives, with skill. When they were ready he brought them to Ahumado, who tested them one by one. He used fine threads from his blanket, cutting the threads with the mere touch.
“Are we going to skin the white man?” Goyeto asked. “I’ll have him tied to the post, if you want.”
When Ahumado turned to face him Goyeto’s heart almost stopped, from the look that was in Ahumado’s eyes. Goyeto did not even have the strength to stammer. He knew he had been discovered; an old sin, one he had committed many years before with one of Ahumado’s women, on a blanket amid the horses, had been found out. Goyeto had long feared discovery—Ahumado was jealous of his women—but Ahumado had been one hundred miles away, on a trip to catch slaves, when the woman coaxed him onto the blanket. She was a lustful woman; she had tried to coax him onto the blanket many times, but Goyeto had been too fearful of Ahumado’s vengeance. He had only coupled with the woman that once.
When Ahumado turned his snakelike look on him, Goyeto knew who the knives had been sharpened for. He jumped up and tried to run, but the vaqueros quickly caught him. At Ahumado’s command they took all his clothes off and tied him to the post where he had practiced his delicate art for so long. Goyeto felt such a fear that he wanted to die. No one but himself knew how to skin a man—if one of the crude young pistoleros tried to skin him it would just be butchery; they would hack his flesh off, with his skin.
Then Ahumado himself rose from his blanket and took the knives. He stuck them one by one into the post above Goyeto’s head, so that, as one became dull, he could take another.
The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4) Page 96