Her voice quivered. “The valley of the shadow of death.”
“There’s more to it than that.”
“But it’s a song, isn’t it? Not a prayer.”
He shrugged. “Sing to your God…pray to Him. The cadence doesn’t matter. The message finds its way to Heaven, all the same.”
The padre and the nun wished Sarah good evening, and promised to visit with her again before they turned in for the night—but first, they would watch.
“Before we begin,” the padre said, “I should gather some things. If you’ll excuse me.”
“I understand. I have my own tools—rudimentary as they are, in the face of something like this. But I’d rather not fight empty-handed.”
“So long as the Mother holds our hands, they are never empty.”
She bowed her head. “You are right, of course.”
“I did not mean—”
“I only meant—”
They stopped, and regarded one another with a small measure of uncertainty. The nun’s peculiar eyes flickered and flashed, and then were ordinary once again; and the padre thought to himself that this woman may fight empty-handed, from time to time…but he doubted she was ever unarmed.
“I must excuse myself,” he tried again. “I will meet you again…here? Or have you some other preference? This appears to be the center, but it’s difficult to watch something while standing in the middle of it.”
She smiled, and said, “That is an excellent way to put it. Let us meet in the courtyard in half an hour. Is that long enough?”
“Yes, sister. Half an hour, and I’ll see you there.”
Up in his room, he sat on his bed and removed his hat. Then he removed his black cotton frock, and stood in a pair of canvas trousers and the boots he always wore when he might be called upon to walk, or fight.
He stretched, and yawned. It was only a bit of travel fatigue, but he was annoyed with himself all the same.
He wanted some water.
The hotel had indoor plumbing of the latest and highest standard, with one tap for hot and one tap for cold—a luxury scarcely to be believed. He turned them both to full blast and filled the sink’s ceramic bowl with warm, clean water that smelled faintly of metal and salt; he dipped his hands in it, splashed his face, and rubbed at his eyes. When he opened them again, he was staring above the small basin at the gilded mirror mounted on the wall, its silvering bright and new like everything else inside the Jacaranda Hotel (if not what lurked beneath it). The padre splashed his face again, then picked up the small towel that hung beside the mirror. He patted the last droplets from his cheeks while staring into his own reflection.
He would ask Sarah about coffee, when he returned downstairs. He didn’t much care for the flavor, but he always appreciated the results.
He checked the mirror again.
Yes, he was tired…but the years were chasing him, so he kept running. They closed in, all the same. Every crinkle around his eyes, each thread of gray at his temples, and all the old scars deepened with every passing season. He was not as strong and broad as he once had been, but he was still strong enough, broad enough. His chest was lean and sinewy, but not yet sunken. His skin was looser at the joints, but it mostly remained a smooth, tea-colored canvas for a dozen tattoos done in ages past—in another lifetime, or it might as well have been.
Not all of the images were expertly applied, and most of them held little meaning.
Some said only that he’d spent too much time in the company of bad men: a scorpion here, a coyote there. A cross on his right inner wrist, done with a needle during his first stay in prison. (It wasn’t a sign of devotion; it was a sign that he didn’t trust the artist with anything more complex.) A sun with wildly waving rays on his left forearm—the only piece with any color, though it was mostly faded now and the orange scarcely showed at all.
The only tattoo that mattered, was one he couldn’t see without a craned neck and a large mirror.
It ran across his back, from shoulder to shoulder in blocky, gothic script: his final tattoo. He’d bought it in Juarez, commissioned it by a professional with a steady hand—a man who’d decorated sailors, circus performers, and cowboys alike. The padre had sat down for five hours, leaning forward with his arms wrapped around a dirty horsehair pillow.
Deo, non Fortuna.
By God, not by chance.
It wasn’t always like this.
Mexico, 1889
(Six years before Juan Miguel Quintero Rios ever heard of the Jacaranda Hotel.)
West of Texas there were gunslingers—four in particular, banded together by blood and familiarity: brothers Juan Miguel and Roberto, with their cousin Luiz; and a friend they’d known since childhood, Eduardo—a man with a mind unfailingly keen, but judgment unerringly poor. They’d grown up together, orphans in Mexico City. No one cared for them, and they returned the favor in spades.
They took up guns, and then they took whatever they could earn or steal. At first they stole crumbs, and earned mostly wrath. But as they grew taller and bolder—as they had less and less to lose—they stole things of greater value: better food, nicer watches and rings. Horses. Gold, when they could find it. More often silver, for it was easier to come by.
In time, they earned reputations. They earned fear.
They bought better clothes and saddles, and brighter guns with intricate engravings. They went to jail sometimes, and sometimes they escaped. Sometimes they served their time, or bought their way free. One by one, in and out.
The cycle became familiar. It became their lives.
Until one day when Luiz was caught with a rich man’s wife, and the rich man shot him dead. Two bullets, one between the eyes, one in the throat. The gunslingers claimed his body and buried him at night, beside a church—when no one could tell them not to. Luiz would’ve wanted the churchyard for his bed.
“Felon, fiend, and fighter, but still a son of God,” he would’ve vowed. He would’ve kissed the medallion he wore around his neck and winked at the sky, if it’d been anyone’s funeral but his.
They put him in the earth with the saint around his neck, the coin lying flat upon his chest. And their band was down to three.
Four months more, they rode together—when Roberto fell from his horse as they fled a bank they’d freshly robbed. His head split open on a rock. His horse kept running.
Juan Miguel stopped. Eduardo paused, and then kept riding.
Juan Miguel gathered up his brother’s brains and bones and hefted him onto his own horse, then rode with him to the small canyon where the men always regrouped when they were scattered by chance. Eduardo was not there, and he never did return.
Roberto lived another two days, his skull leaking through the narrow cot he rested upon, his blood puddling on the floor beneath it. He finally stopped breathing, his eyes still open and staring at the beams across the ceiling.
Later that night, Juan Miguel tried to bury Roberto beside Luiz, but a nun saw him creeping through the churchyard and raised the alarm. She did not raise it loudly. She only summoned the priest who served the small parish at the edge of the city.
The priest was a lean, young man with a serious face and sorrowful eyes, and he caught up to Juan Miguel because the gunslinger would not part with his brother’s body—wrapped in a sheet, and growing stiff. It weighed him down, and he’d trudged only halfway back to his horse when the young priest stopped him with a word.
“Esperar.”
Exhausted, crippled with grief, and alone in all the world…Juan Miguel hesitated. He shifted his grip on his brother, and he faced the priest with surrender. He had nothing left to fight with.
“Wait,” the priest said again. “I will get a shovel. I will help you dig.”
When it was done, and when there was a mound of dirt and a makeshift cross above Roberto’s mortal remains, the priest said his prayers and Juan Miguel stayed silent.
“Have you anything left?” the priest asked. “Anyone?”
/> He shook his head, but could not unclench his throat to speak.
A small lantern spit and fizzled from its perch atop a nearby stone. By its light, the priest looked down at his guest’s forearm—and he saw the large crucifix which had been so badly applied there. “Do you believe in anything?” he asked. “Anyone?”
Juan Miguel did not know, so he did not speak. He did not move his head.
“There’s another way. I think you should consider it.”
“It’s too late for that,” he whispered.
“Better late, than never.”
But not there, so close to the city where the four bandits had made their names.
***
In time, with patience, and with far greater trust than Juan Miguel deserved by his own admission…the young priest made arrangements elsewhere. There was a new chapel, much closer to Texas—but much farther from the capital—in a place called El Huizache. It was a place to start over, a new life bought with a promise: never again.
Juan Miguel Quintero Rios did not make his promise to the priest. He promised higher than that, as high as he could reach: Alone at night, he knelt before the icon of Mary, lit his candles, crossed himself, and he vowed, “Never again. I will never touch the guns again.”
He kept them all the same, wrapped in his brother’s shirt. Everything a reminder, everything a debt to be paid. Too heavy to carry, too important to leave behind.
The gleam of the handsome six-shooters never dulled, and their delicate whorled designs never grew faint from repeated handling; and when the newly reborn “Juan Rios” arrived to shepherd the men and women of El Huizache, he put the guns inside the altar—atop the relic box.
Within that box rested a tooth and a bone that might have come from a knuckle. Regardless of its precise origin, both pieces had once belonged to a saint named “Macarius” according to the note the new padre was given.
He debated the wisdom of stashing the guns with the relic.
On the one hand, it felt like sacrilege—those guns had threatened, harmed, and even murdered. On the other, they were holy after a fashion. Every day that passed, every hour, every second he left them where they were and did not draw them, did not turn them in his hands, did not run his fingers over the inlaid handles or the rich designs…they were his promise to the Mother.
He chose to believe that She understood.
***
Two years passed.
And then Eduardo returned.
He returned quietly the first time—strolling into the chapel at midday, on a Thursday, when no one was present except for Juan Rios and the lone altar boy who swept the floors and scraped wax off the windowsills. The padre flashed the child a warning look, and he left without finishing.
The two men faced one another in the center aisle, with the cross and the Mother watching them both.
Eduardo stood with his feet apart, hands on his hips. Almost the pose of a man about to draw, but not quite. His hair was longer but his clothes were no cleaner, no better mended. He did not look very different, except for a dark tattoo that snaked out from his collar, and up along his neck.
“What the hell is this?” he asked, waving one hand at the pews, the candles, the padre.
“Things change.”
“People don’t,” he countered, eyeing the chapel and all its modest accouterments. “What game is this? What plan? Are you learning about a new treasure, buried someplace beyond the town?”
“If there’s any such treasure, I’m unaware of it.”
“It’s a shithole, this place.”
“It’s my home now.”
Eduardo lowered his eyebrows, and narrowed his gaze. “I don’t believe that. I don’t believe any of this. You look ridiculous in that frock. Mother of God, what would Roberto say?”
“Not much. Him or Luiz, either. And if you’re going to swear, you could at least do it outside.” The padre turned his back. He pretended to tend the candles. He was careful to keep his eyes off the altar.
“There must be something of value here.”
Juan Rios did not like the tone, or the implication. He’d used it before himself, and he knew it for the threat it was. “There is much of value here. Treasure in Heaven, or a map to take you there.” He waved toward the cross, the Mother. “Otherwise, as you said yourself: There’s little to recommend the place. No money here, just farmers and cooks, serving girls and the caballeros who come and go with the season. If it’s treasure you want, you’ll find more of it almost anywhere else.”
“Then why are you still here?”
“I told you,” he sighed, and turned around again.
Eduardo’s hand was on his gun, not brandishing it, but resting there—an old stance, an easy pose that Juan Rios remembered very well. He remembered the feel of a gunbelt slung around his pelvis, the weight of the firearms and the calluses they’d rub through his trousers, against his hipbones.
“I don’t believe you. You are a liar, same as me.”
“There’s nothing here for you. You left me once, so leave me again. The first time, it turned out to be a favor. Do it again, and I’ll remember you well. If you have any friends, they can bury you here in the yard. That’s all I have to offer.”
“But people pay tithes. They pay their pennies to the church.”
“Not very many. You could find more beside the road, lost by the stagecoach drivers. Search the place if you want, I don’t really care. I’m telling you the truth. You should try it sometime. I find it…liberating.”
But Eduardo did not search the chapel. He turned on his heel and left.
He did not return until mass, on the following Sunday.
He did not return alone.
Eduardo came back noisily this time, with twelve men at his side.
They burst into the chapel together and fired their pistols into the ceiling, raining adobe and splinters down onto the people who came there to pray and be blessed. They strolled up and down the center aisle, and made sure everyone saw the guns—they pointed them at everyone, darting their aim back and forth, catching every terrified face for a second at a time.
Old women huddled in their shawls; mothers clutched their children. Babies cried, startled by the sudden noise. Men looked wildly between the bandits and the door, and their wives and sons, and at the padre—who stood behind the altar.
Juan Rios held a black-beaded rosary tangled in his fingers. He barely breathed.
“Up,” Eduardo directed him, meaning he should raise his hands.
Slowly, to demonstrate that he would not resist, he slipped the rosary around his neck and then lifted his hands, as instructed. “You’ve made some friends.”
“Better friends. Stronger ones.”
The padre nodded. So these were friends who had been bought, and could not be kept except with gold. He understood. Even if Eduardo had any lingering loyalties or leftover sentiment about the bad old days…his companions had no such softness about them.
His eyes flickered to Anna Perez, bobbing gently back and forth. Praying. Her hair fallen across her face. She was beautiful, and she did not want these men to see her; she was young, but she understood plenty about how the world worked. In the last row, the Garcia twins—eleven years old, had been sent to pray for their aunt. Both of them radiated panic and a desire to run for the door, but the padre knew they’d never reach it. Down front was the widow Santos, ninety years old. Frail and shaking, wearing a silver locket with a snippet of her husband’s hair. She was also wearing a wedding band worth more than anything else in the church, except perhaps Juan Rios’s fancy guns.
Which were in the altar.
They were wrapped in his dead brother’s shirt, still stained with old, dry blood, lying atop a box that held a tooth and a knuckle bone from a man who may have lived a thousand years ago, and may have died for Christ.
He glanced down at the nook. He masked it by briefly closing his eyes.
No.
The guns were not wrapped
in the shirt. They were lying naked, back to back. Handle to handle.
Did he do that? Before the mass? Before the bandits? After Eduardo’s visit, when he knew there was a very good chance they’d see one another again?
Maybe then, in a half-dreaming state of habit, he had unwrapped the guns and readied them, loaded them. He had been the one to lay them out, and prepare them for service. Hadn’t he?
Hadn’t he?
Yes. No. He couldn’t remember.
While the gunmen postured and preened, Rios lifted his gaze and looked from face to horrified face, along the rows of men and women seated on the rough-cut pews. He saw four families with nine children between them; one old man and three old women past the age of eighty; three maidens; half a dozen stray youths, caught in that odd age between boyhood and manhood, girlhood and womanhood.
He watched Eduardo’s eyes light up at the quivering, slump-back shape of the widow Santos. He saw one of the bandits use the barrel of his gun to nudge back Anna’s hair, in order to see her better.
“Eduardo,” the padre said. Not suddenly, but loudly enough to remind his old friend who had been the faster draw, the better shot.
Eduardo took his attention from the widow. “Juan Miguel?”
“Leave, and take your friends with you. I won’t ask again.”
The friends laughed. Eduardo did not. He met the padre’s serious stare blink for blink, while the chaos lifted and rose, conducted like music, by the men with guns. Anna cried out and ducked away, and the widow sobbed, and the antsy feet of the Garcia twins scraped against the floor.
Any moment, it would reach a pitch that meant there was no return, no snuffing of the dynamite’s wick.
The padre did not budge. His arms were not tired from being raised up beside his head. They did not twitch or shake, and he breathed as softly, as calmly, as if he were only standing in a garden. This was not his first time. This was not the first promise he would ever break.
Only the biggest.
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