by David Xavier
“What makes you say that?”
He turned back to the light. “A hope. A prayer.”
“That indian is lucky I didn’t shoot him dead when I had the chance over him,” Marquez said.
“What’d you say?” Arturo said. “Mumble louder.”
“I said that indian is lucky I didn’t shoot him…when I…”
Tsunipu appeared at the fire’s edge with what looked like a mouse dangling from his hand. The men sat still. The indian tossed the animal to Salomon. He held it up. A rabbit. They ate tearing meat from bone as their faces flashed in and out of the night. Salomon sat motionless for a time, then broke his stillness by reaching into his shirt. He pulled the folded papers, one of them bloodstained, and held them to the fire until they flared up.
Tsunipu lit a cigarillo by the smoldered end of a stick. The burning tobacco glowed in his black eyes each time he drew on it. He spoke. “You are going after Americans?”
“No,” Salomon said. He sent a glance to Arturo and Marquez. “No, we’re not. We are selling cattle to them.”
The indian sat silent before speaking again in a flat tone. “Funny way to sell cattle.”
“That was – an accident.”
“You get their money, your cattle back, and you erase any witness. Good accident.”
“It was an accident.”
The indian nodded. “Americans killed your wife and child. And you killed them for it. Was that an accident?”
“They stole from me.”
“And you stole from them.”
Salomon sat back. Tsunipu gave a small wave with his cigarillo hand. “Their gold. Accident.”
Marquez and Arturo looked beyond the firelight to the saddlebags of gold.
“We are rancheros,” Salomon said. “Not bandits.”
“Your cattle have mixed brands. But you don’t have to convince me.” He turned to Salomon, his face broad and eyes black. “You should go after Americans.”
Salomon’s throat moved up and down in a knot. “Are you? Going after Americans.”
Tsunipu did not answer. Arturo tossed a bone into the coals and watched it hiss and catch fire. He raised his eyes over the firelight.
“Are you sleeping here tonight?”
The indian turned from the darkness. He looked back to the night and continued smoking.
“What I mean is, will I wake up in the morning?”
Tsunipu exhaled through his nose and spoke without turning. “Do what you like.”
The fire crackled and shifted. Arturo tried again. “Where are you sleeping?”
“Out there.”
Marquez looked out there and repeated in a whisper without knowing it. “Out there.”
Salomon slept facing the wall of the mud hut while Marquez and Arturo took turns watching the door with a pistola resting on their lap. Every so often the one on watch would recheck the window and door and peep the night through the slits in the framework. The other would raise his head from the bed and ask if anything moved.
In the morning Salomon cleaned his rifle and pistolas and checked the flintlocks. He kept raising his head to look around, but the indian was not around. He put his sombrero on and gathered his pony close, slipping the rifle sling around his shoulders and checking his paper cartridges.
“Where are you going?” Arturo said.
“Where do you think?”
“El Camino Real?”
Salomon swung a leg over his pony.
“You are going after gold? Aren’t you?”
Salomon did not answer.
“What about that indian? Where is he?”
Marquez came tucking his shirt as he emerged from the mud hut. “Where is he going?”
“To El Camino Real. To get rich.
“What will you do with your cattle?”
Salomon looked to the cattlefields. “Let them roam.”
“What about the gold dust?”
“What about it?”
“Give me a minute to bury it.”
The two men watched Salomon. He had become a quiet man. A man who stared into flamelight with dark eyes and a clenched jaw, the muscled twitch like that of a horse’s breast. He looked down at them and the two men could not move. The pony paced beneath him.
“Well come on if you’re coming.”
He nudged forward at a trotting pace, alone into those desolate badlands pursuing rumor and revenge. Arturo and Marquez watched for a moment, then turned together and gathered their things and caught the horses. Arturo kicked over the blackened tree stump and stood as ants and earwigs spilled at his feet. They carried the gold dust one saddlebag at a time in front of them, like men carrying anvils, and loaded the horsebacks. They circled one last time in the yard and set out the two of them with the six horses reined behind them.
When they caught up to Salomon he was still trotting and the indian rode beside him. They joined them on the opposite side. Salomon turned on his horseback to look behind, and then looked to the two men beside him. He looked back again.
“Do we need all those horses?”
“It would be cruel to load all the gold onto one horse,” Marquez said. “This way they are all working. All happy.”
“What do you plan to do with all that gold? Haul it with us everywhere?”
“I don’t know. You didn’t give me a minute to bury it. We didn’t know if we would be coming back.”
Salomon looked sideways at them. They crossed a white wash where water once flowed and climbed a talus outcrop their horses slipped and caught themselves on. On flat grass Salomon spoke again.
“Why wouldn’t we come back?”
But no man answered. They camped and ate silently to themselves and rode beside each other the next days into the arroyos, the red rocked canyons where men wandered heavy with gold. The walls grew high on all sides of them and their horse steps in the sand echoed the muted sound of a hundred hoofs, a hundred men on the drums. Marquez leaned back in his saddle with his face raised to the skyline, his eyes tracing the ups and downs of the massive rocks on all sides, going from one side to the other, his mouth slightly open. He caught up and trailed behind again. Arturo looked back.
“Your first time here?”
Marquez brought his eyes down, his face still up. He closed his mouth and kicked his horse forward.
“He has never seen rocks so high.”
Arturo’s laugh bounced from wall to wall, an amused court. At the front of the column, Salomon looked back with a grin. The indian’s face was unmoved behind him. Salomon rode on, his smile gone.
They meandered through passages and under arcs and came to a fork where one side led wide and sunny and the other narrow. Tsunipu nodded to the narrow side and they rode single file to where the rock walls touched their heels on either side and narrowed more still. Here they could hear their horses breathing as they forced through the gaps, like burrowed animals searching for light. Salomon turned but Tsunipu’s face had not changed, and around one final curve the walls retreated from each other and the horses could breathe in full again.
The walls looked the same at every turn, smooth and corrugated by wind and ancient water, howled by lost ghosts behind each curve and chamber. Only by way of shadows’ repose opposite the sun could a traveler find his direction. But the sun switches sides and shadows crawl. They circle each other like fighters.
The sand beneath them turned to stone and the hoofs knocked like gravestone hammers, a volley of mallets around every turn, taunting with two chisel strikes to answer every one. Salomon stopped for a moment to hear the silence again, just for the one instant, to remind himself he had not gone insane. The pale walls began to shrink at their flanks and they came out to find they had climbed atop the canyons without knowing and stood now where the sun beat the stones and dried away any pools, and the unclouded sky gave the eyes a break from the red walls. They could stand at the canyon edge and look down a hundred yards to where they once tread, a snake’s width from above.
“A man would get stuck halfway if he fell.”
Arturo looked at Marquez. Marquez nodded and looked to the others. He went from face to face.
“Look. A man could get wedged in there. You’d have to toss a rope down and haul him back out. Or go underneath and pull his legs. Right?”
Tsunipu leaned and spat. “No.”
They camped at the edge where the canyon parapets dropped away or ceased altogether and El Camino Real trailed across the starlit sand into the flat desert below them, every nightshadow reduced to nothing or increased tenfold, the creosote and joshuas scattered to shiver in place. An alien landscape miniscule and desolate to scroll beneath the flight of birds.
There were nine of them, appearing in a bunch in the distance, their shortshadows keeping up alongside them like silent beggars. Salomon was on his belly at canyon’s edge, one hand on his sombrero beside him. He rolled to his back and closed his eyes to the sun and lay there for some time before crouching his way back to camp. Arturo had gathered an armful of withered gray limbs and squatted with them over the week’s worth of coals.
“Don’t light those.”
“I thought I’d put on some of these sage hens.”
“It’ll wait.”
Salomon took his propped rifle by the barrel and checked the flint. Marquez lifted his hat from his face and Arturo stood on wide legs, shavings of grass and twigs falling from his lap.
“Is someone coming?”
“A party of nine.”
The two men went for their pistolas and followed after Salomon to the canyon’s edge where El Camino Real entered and the rock walls were not yet bald nor vertical. They made their way down the slope, picking among the crevices and tree limbs that reached out like trapped souls from fissures in the rock face, until they were at a distance from the canyon’s mouth where they could fire accurately without aiming. They spread out as they could and hid among the rocks as the riders approached and gained features.
“Wish I had that machete.”
“Shut up.” Arturo placed a pebble in his mouth and spoke around it. “Where is that indian?”
Salomon gave them both a sign to shut their mouths, then he looked upon the slope on either side and could not see Tsunipu. He checked and cocked his pistolas and placed them in front him, then rubbed a handful of dust over his rifle barrel and put it to his shoulder and steadied its sights upon the canyon entrance.
The riders came in at a trot and were cut in half by the first volley, falling from saddles and reared horses, their faces going wide-eyed and fearful as the smoke rolled over them and the gunfire roared through the rocks as menacing as a coming flood.
The attackers shucked their paper cartridges and reloaded in a matter of breaths taken, and stood from their spots with pistolas aimed, but held their fire. A figure moved among the hanging gunsmoke, a silent dark streak, massive on foot among the circling horses and uplooking riders, dropping the remaining men from their mounts without a scream or yelp taken. They fell from their mounts with hoarse breaths and throats bubbling red beneath grasped hands, their fading eyes searching about for their killer, but the figure was gone.
On the ground, Salomon stepped over one writhing man to catch the reins of a shying horse. He went through the saddlebags as Arturo cocked and fired downward behind him. The horses were gathered and the fortunes counted. The bodies were rifled over and valuables taken. Marquez tossed his sombrero aside and tried a hat from one of the dead Americans. He soon tossed it and retrieved his sombrero. They slung the bodies over the horses and left the sand clear of obstruction or trace of any doing apart from the clumps of red that would soon dry and mingle.
They rode the dead to some distant arroyo off the ridden path and dumped them limp and cold and newly poor to tumble upon the chaparral and some of them lay face up with open eyes for buzzards to pick at and coyotes to drag away in bites.
At the camp atop the canyon, Arturo knelt over the collected branches and started his fire, the smell of death not yet gone from his clothing and flies still buzzing at the spilled blood on his shoulders. They now had double the horses tied at a hitching rope between two trees, each with their own saddlebags of gold dust to carry. Marquez moved about them and spoke quietly to each. He took his time with the horse he had stolen named Gallito, the white one among the dark animals. Salomon stood watching nearby.
“Can’t you get rid of some of them?”
“To where? To turn them loose to the wild? No, no, no…”
“That white one could not glow brighter even if you set him on fire. Should have left half of them to run at the rancho.”
“I could not leave them behind. You gave us a look.”
“What look?”
“One that said you would not return to the rancho,” Arturo said from the fire. “One that said you were sure of one thing only. Of where you were going.”
“And where is that?”
Tsunipu spoke. “To hell.”
The men turned. The indian stood at the edge of camp, his face largely unchanged from when they had last seen it. He carried no blood on him, not his or any man’s. Nothing to show he had been a part of such a massacre. Salomon shifted.
“I’m not the one going to hell. I’m sending them to hell.”
Tsunipu sat at the newly crackling fire. They watched him. He drew his knife and held it to the flames. Arturo eased himself off his knees to sit upon a fireside stone, looking behind him once to locate the stone but keeping his eyes mostly on the indian. Tsunipu turned to Salomon.
“Do they know that?”
His voice carried across that canyontop seemingly unstoppable, that it might circle the earth and be heard again just as loud. The flames bent to flicker at each word, and straighten in silence. Salomon sat at the fire and Marquez eventually stood with them opposite of Tsunipu, the firepit lopsided in attendance.
“I don’t care if they do or not,” Salomon said.
The indian did not speak but turned his knife in the flames. Salomon could see no smear or mark on the blade. Marquez squatted.
“When you die, will you go to hell?”
Tsunipu looked up. “No.”
“Why not? You killed the same men as we did. More even.”
“When I die, my bones will turn to dust on the ground.”
“I thought the Comanche believed in the spirit wind. The great beyond.”
“I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“The great beyond? That sounds as senseless as your going to heaven to be with your god in the clouds.”
Marquez looked to the others, then back to the indian. “Then what happens?”
“Nothing at all.”
“No soaring upon the spirit wind?”
“My bones will dry and crumble. The wind will do with it what it does to all dust.”
“You don’t get a spirit? A soul? Something people can pray for or something you can travel the earth with when you are gone? Something to be remembered by?”
Tsunipu pulled his knife from the flames. It glowed red even in the sunlight. He opened his hide vest and the men saw a gouge at his ribcage, open but not bleeding, the white of bone floating behind the slit.
“When I die, I die.”
He pressed the glowing blade to the gash and the men reacted. The burning flesh hissed and smoked and yet Tsunipu did not flinch.
“Some men on earth will remember me. They will not be able to forget.”
He took the knife away and the wound had transformed to a smear of pink. A deformed burn upon his ribs in the curve of a blade, stamped on his skin and lumped as if a knife were concealed there. He held his blade in the flames once again. He lifted his eyes and the men were still watching him.
“Were you going to cook some sage birds?”
Salomon sat beyond the firelight and sorted through the dozens of tied packs and saddlebags of gold dust. He stared up
on the riches for some time the way mystics do upon a crystal ball, guessing at what will come. Arturo and Marquez watched from their fireside seats. When Salomon did not move for some time, they settled and sat back with their arms crossed and watched the crackling fire and the orange tint of smoke rising to the stars.
They stood the both of them when Salomon stirred, and they stepped together from the fire. Salomon was tossing saddlebags over his pony’s back and inching them in place.
“Where are you going?” Marquez asked him.
Salomon looked down from his pony. “To the church in Santa Maria.”
“You give away all our gold there will be nothing left.”
“How rich a man do you want to be?”
“Rich enough. As rich as ten men.”
Salomon wheeled his horse. “You gather those ten men together and tell me how it goes.”
“Salomon.”
He raised a hand as his back faded into the night and Arturo and Marquez were left listening to the clop of the horse hoofs die away.
Salomon rode at a high lope through the desert night, a single rider escaping an unseen enemy. He rode the cool night, soundless about him for miles, the night sky turning slowly above him, dragging the stars overhead. The sands blow as far as the wind can take them, and he rode to where the wind exhausted its breath and grass filled in and trees grew in groves. A stream snaked across the plain with a glittering back and he watered his horse and dismounted, stretching out on his belly for a drink himself.
He put his face to the water and saw in the water the eyes of a boy he once knew looking back. He searched the water but he could not find a companion for the boy. It was in the untouched waters of the earth that he had found her once, but she no longer appeared for him. He dashed his fingers at the the reflection and looked again, but he was alone.
He camped several hours under the pines, closing his eyes to the swaying needles overhead, and the next day he rode through the red dusts that drifted across the land from the Ranchita del Playa Negro. He bowed his head to the red powder and continued into Santa Maria, keeping to the shadows and back alleys of the town. He left his pony untethered behind the church and put his hands in the saddlebags before he stepped across the incensed steeple into the dim church. The pews were empty and windowlit, the stone floor seemed to echo the slow drip of water somewhere. Touching a finger to the holy water, he crossed himself as he walked the aisle to the front, where a single candle burned upon the altar beneath a wood-carved crucifix. He fell to his knees before it and stayed there with his head lowered as the sun peeked in from window to window so his shadow moved from one side of the altar to the other and disappeared altogether.