Wraiths of the Broken Land

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by S. Craig Zahler


  The gunfighter turned away from the young man, holstered the black six-shooter that was one of two upon his waist, and walked across the room.

  Seated upon the windowsill and silhouetted by the drear gray sky was John Lawrence Plugford, a huge man with fifty-six years, a wild beard and worn gray overalls. “You’re done drinkin’ until we get home.” It sounded as if the man’s throat were filled with dry autumn leaves.

  “I didn’t take that much,” Stevie defended, “I only—”

  “Don’t make Pa repeat himself,” said Brent. “This ain’t no sojourn.”

  “I know it ain’t.”

  Brent felt a terrible agony in his chest as he pondered the purpose of their journey.

  A fist knocked thrice upon the door. Two shooting stars that were drawn pistols arced across Long Clay’s black shirt.

  A key tickled plaintive tumblers, and the door opened. Standing in the hallway with two lamb chops in his left hand was Patch Up, a short and pudgy gray-haired negro who was clothed in a maroon suit far finer than any garment worn by the white men. He eyed the tips of Long Clay’s revolvers—one was trained upon his face and the other was pointed at his heart—and fearlessly chewed. Through a mouth full of food, the negro said, “If this is about the lamb chops, I’m willing to make a deal.”

  The tall narrow gunfighter holstered his weapons and turned away.

  Patch Up swallowed, entered the room and closed the door. “Good morning folks.”

  “Mornin’,” replied Brent.

  “Mornin’,” croaked Stevie.

  The negro strode over to the window and proffered the second lamb chop to the huge patriarch. “Your favorite.”

  John Lawrence Plugford shook his head and returned his gaze to the gray dawn outside the window. The wild beard that sprouted from his face and neck seemed like an explosion of outrage.

  “It’s cooked all the way through,” added the negro.

  The huge man remained uninterested.

  “Pa,” Brent said, “you need to eat. We’ve got a big ride today.”

  John Lawrence Plugford took the proffered victual, whispered, “Thanks,” and turned again to the gray window. The lamb chop sat in his thick hands like a musical instrument that he did not know how to play.

  Brent stretched, set his soles upon the worn plaid carpet and walked toward the yellow dresser, upon which his washed underclothes were sprawled like flat gray men.

  “Where’s that Indian?” Stevie asked Patch Up.

  “You forget his name?”

  “No.”

  “People have names for a reason. Even niggers and Indians.”

  “Where’s Deep Lake?” asked Stevie.

  “It’s Deep Lakes,” Patch Up stated, “there’s an ‘s’ at the end.”

  “But there’s only one of him.”

  “That’s his name.”

  Stevie stood from the bed and stretched. “You tryin’ to make me orn’ry?”

  “You should respect what people want to be called. You want me to call you Stovie?”

  “I wouldn’t. Where’s Deep Lakes?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Brent looked up from his damp long drawers and inquired, “He didn’t stay with you in the servants’ quarters?”

  “The cooks wouldn’t bunk with an Indian,” said Patch Up. “I told them he was civilized, but they’re suspicious negroes. Deep Lakes said he’d make a camp somewhere and leave town when we do.”

  Unhappy that the native had been ostracized, Brent said, “He should’ve come to me with this grievance.”

  “He doesn’t want to force his company where he isn’t wanted.”

  “Okay.”

  Brent set damp socks that still smelled like soap into his suitcase, and nearby, Stevie began to gather his belongings.

  Something thudded within the closet, and was succeeded by a dimly audible moan. Brent’s face darkened with anger.

  “Goddamn that dumb idiot,” remarked Stevie.

  Long Clay walked across the room and opened the closet door. Standing upright within the enclosure and wobbling minutely was a large black trunk.

  The gunfighter banged the handle of his pistol upon the wood. “Keep quiet or I’ll get mean.”

  The man inside the trunk was silent.

  Brent glanced over at his father. John Lawrence Plugford’s vitriolic eyes seared the air. The uneaten lamb chop fell to the sawdust, and the huge man slapped his right hand to the grip of his black sawed-off shotgun.

  “J.L.,” cautioned Patch Up.

  Brent hastened to the window, gripped his father’s right wrist and said, “Let go of it.”

  Long Clay interposed himself between John Lawrence Plugford and the trunk and extricated a flask of bourbon from his rear pocket. Light shone upon the silver vessel and glared in the wild eyes of the patriarch.

  “Get calm,” said the gunfighter.

  John Lawrence Plugford released the grip of his sawed-off shotgun, took the flask from Long Clay, spun the cap and inserted the nozzle into the thicket that surrounded his vanished mouth. He drank three draughts and summarily replaced his gaze upon the gray morning. As had often been the case for more than half a year, the huge patriarch was beyond words.

  Patch Up reclaimed the fallen lamb chop, wiped sawdust from its surface and wrapped it in a piece of wax paper.

  Long Clay looked at Brent and Stevie. “Drain the trunk and put it in the wagon. Now.”

  Chapter IV

  A Ballad for the Real People

  Humberto Calles walked toward the gallows that had been erected in Nueva Vida two summers ago, over fifty years after the true people of the land had yielded precious Mexican acres to pale Texicans. The punitive structure was a visibly imposing icon of justice that regularly provided onlookers with an entertaining spectacle, especially if the hanged man struggled overlong or was accidentally decapitated by the noose.

  The lone walker reached the gallows, wiped beads of sweat from his head, covered his bald scalp with a sombrero, climbed steps that were decorated with artful tiles that would surely please the eye of any aesthete condemned to death and ascended toward an empty gray heaven. Winded from his climb, the fifty-four-year-old Mexican strode across the platform to the balustrade.

  From the stage of death, Humberto asked the onlookers if they would like to hear a song.

  “¡Por favor!” shouted eight of the twenty-four people below. Humberto scanned the gathering to see if any town officials were in attendance (they did not want their serious structure used for non-lethal entertainments), but he did not see anybody who might trouble him.

  As he adjusted the four strings stretched across the bejeweled frets of his polished blue guitarrita, the balladeer surveyed the crowd. The assemblage was comprised of unhurried people—seamstresses, farmers and old men—and so Humberto decided to perform a long and melancholic song that would appeal to their sensibilities. He squeezed a chord upon his guitarrita’s enameled neck and, with the thick nails that jutted from the fingertips of his right hand, sharply plucked the strings. Atop this steady arpeggio of musical raindrops, Humberto introduced the composition, a ballad entitled, “Beneath the Pebbles,” which was the true story of a man who had fought in the war against the pale Texicans more than fifty years ago.

  Strumming a lush augmented chord, Humberto began to sing.

  Black clouds rained upon a small farming village in Mexico. In an adobe that was only three seasons old, a man named Alexzander said goodbye to his wife, Gabrielle, who was pregnant with their first child. The twenty-five-year-old man deeply regretted leaving his beloved, but the war with the pale Texicans was going poorly, and he needed to see that the true people of the land retained what was rightfully theirs. Gabrielle wept. (Humberto played isolated high notes in the p
izzicato style upon the thinnest string of his guitarrita.) Despite her sadness, the selfless Mexican woman did not protest her husband’s departure because she knew that he must do his duty. They kissed.

  (Humberto articulated two melodies that became one harmonized line—the refrain of their love.)

  Accompanied by four of his childhood friends, Alexzander departed the small town, journeyed north and joined a failing regiment that was encamped on a Tejas hacienda that had recently been seized by the Mexican army. The gringos had won two decisive battles in the surrounding region, and Alexzander’s superior, El Capitán Jesus Garcia, knew that an unorthodox gambit was needed to defeat the Texicans.

  The officer’s plan was simple. Alexzander and his four childhood friends were to hide themselves in a mountain pass that was used by the enemy messengers and slaughter the letter bearers before they ever reached the Texican fort. Alexzander, an educated man literate in both Spanish and English, would alter the documents in ways that would benefit the true people of the land and return the revised missives to the messengers’ corpses for the gringos of the fort to find. The soldiers doubted that they would be able to complete their mission, but it was near the end of the war and such desperate gambits were commonplace.

  (Humberto twice played a slow descending melody that was the declining spirit of Mexico.)

  The day before the detachment was to leave, Alexzander received a week old missive from Gabrielle in which she informed him that she had miscarried their child. She had wrapped the tiny baby boy in a shawl, buried him in their backyard beside the pond and decorated the grave with smooth pebbles that she had retrieved from the bottom of the creek where she and Alexzander had once stood, twilit, and exchanged their first kiss.

  (Humberto played the melody that was their love.)

  Alexzander asked Capitán Jesus Garcia to grant him a two-day furlough. The wan soldier hoped to ride south to his village, console his grieving wife and conceive another child before he began his desperate and unlikely mission. The superior officer expected a troop of Texican messengers to come through the pass in the near future and denied Alexzander’s request.

  (The balladeer violently strummed his guitarrita and then muted the strings. Below the gallows platform stood twenty-seven spectators, each imagining a personalized and idiosyncratic version of the tale he told.)

  Alexzander sent a letter to his wife in which he asked her to ride north and hide herself within the abandoned barn situated at the easternmost edge of the hacienda. He knew that she would not receive the missive for at least six days.

  (Humberto flourished his long fingernails and urgently hastened the song.)

  Alexzander and his four friends went to the pass wherein they would ambush the Texican messengers. Within an abandoned savage dugout, the quintet hid and waited. Two weeks later, the Texican messengers came through the defile—a group of thirty pale gringos.

  (The balladeer strummed frantic triplets; the crowd of thirty-one people was still and silent.)

  Although they were outnumbered six-to-one, Alexzander’s detachment, armed with old pistols and knives, engaged the enemy. Half of the pale Texicans were slain in the battle, and four of the Mexicans fell dead to the soil that was rightfully theirs. Alexzander was stabbed in the stomach and shot through the left leg. (Humberto plucked his guitarrita violently and paused. Unaccompanied by his instrument, he spoke.) The mission was a failure.

  (The balladeer plucked a slow and careful minor key melody.)

  Alexzander rose up to his hands and knees and crawled toward the hacienda. He was cold, and he was thirsty, but he did not relent.

  (The slow and careful minor key melody was repeated.)

  Alexzander reached the hacienda and crawled across the grass, toward the barn wherein he hoped to rendezvous with his beloved, Gabrielle. Night fell as he proceeded, slowly and in great agony, but the Mexican was inexorable.

  At dawn, Alexzander entered the barn. He crawled across the hay, past cows with ruptured udders and bloody goats that had devoured their own kind. Gabrielle called out his name, descended from her hiding place and hastened to his side.

  (Humberto played the melody that was their love.)

  Shortly after they had conceived the baby that would grow up to write and sing this song, Alexzander died in Gabrielle’s arms.

  (The audience below the gallows applauded and called out accolades while the final chord decayed.)

  “Gracias,” said Humberto. “Gracias.”

  Through this ballad, Alexzander lived, and Mexicans knew his name and thought upon the many honorable sacrifices that had been made over five decades earlier by the true people of the land against the pale Texicans. The performer warmed when he saw two octogenarians wipe moisture from their rugose cheeks.

  “Bonita cantando,” complimented a weathered septuagenarian who gripped the elongated necks of two dead black hens with her bronze fist.

  Gold and silver pesos clinked and buried the blue-felt lining of the guitar case that Humberto had earlier placed at the foot of the gallows. To his benefactors, the balladeer said, “Gracias. Amigos, gracias.”

  The size of the crowd was not substantial enough to produce a significant pecuniary sum, but Humberto was not overly concerned. The riders from America would soon allay his financial troubles.

  Chapter V

  Gringa Madre

  The man who smelled like fish guts pinched the woman’s nostrils shut and clapped the palm of his other hand over her mouth. His bare belly dragged north and south along her stomach like a hirsute slug, trailing sour perspiration. In between her legs, fire burned.

  The woman bucked in an effort to urge the man who smelled like fish guts toward a hasty climax, certain that once he spilled his fluids, he would release her, apologize and become remorseful. (This was not the first time he had suffocated her.) The man watched her bitten breasts sway and mumbled the word, “Madre.” The woman, a gringa who was ten years his junior, knew that this was the Spanish word for ‘Mother.’

  A full minute without air passed.

  The pain in-between the woman’s legs sharpened, and the sores upon her back shrieked. Within her abused shell, she suffocated. Her heart pounded out while the man pounded in.

  Although she did not relish the life that she now had, the woman did not want to die beneath a fetid wretch who would not notice her expiration until the temperature of her body matched that of the chill subterranean room. Her death should have more meaning than that.

  “Gringa madre.”

  The woman’s entire body pulsated in time with her desperate heart, and her oxygen-starved lungs burned.

  “Madre.” The man’s breath quickened, and his oily belly squeaked across her abdomen, vacillating north and south.

  The woman felt her heart pound within her throat.

  “Gringa madre.” The hairy belly squeaked.

  The woman lost the power of sight and slapped the man’s face as hard as she could.

  Hot fluid streamed inside of her.

  The hands that clasped her nose and mouth withdrew.

  She gasped. Cold air rushed into her burning lungs. After two huge breaths, the woman’s eyesight returned, blurry and with flashing orbs.

  “Sorry,” said the man who smelled like fish guts.

  The woman began to cough.

  “No germs.” Concerned for his safety, the man extracted his diminishing member and rose from the bed.

  “Goddamn.” The woman pressed her bruised thighs together.

  The man pulled on his red trousers, tied a rope belt around his waist, slid his feet into two leather-and-wood sandals, walked over to a cubbyhole, reached inside, rummaged amongst his possessions, extricated a flat bottle and brought it over to the woman. “Bebes.” He set the vessel upon her stomach. “Good drink.”

&nbs
p; The woman examined the wooden flask, which was engraved with the word or name ‘Coco,’ removed its stopper and drank. The liquor tasted like fruity lantern oil, but she consumed it, eager to diminish everything.

  After her fourth draught, she pulled a damp sheet over her sore extremities and looked at Coco’s ugly face. “No sofocarse.” (She did not know how to say, ‘It’s nice to meet you,’ in Spanish, but she knew how to say, ‘Don’t suffocate.’)

  “Sorry.” Upon the far corner of the wooden bed, Coco tilted his lumpy head forward and stared at his terrible toes, which looked like root vegetables arranged in two groups of five. His face was heavy with remorse.

  The woman saw an opportunity.

  “I am going to tell the big jefe that you did sofocarse to me.” (A dead whore had even less value than a coyote carcass, and thus asphyxiation was a forbidden diversion.)

  The lumpy head swiveled toward the woman. “It was accident.” The root vegetables in his sandals stirred anxiously. “I tol’ you I am sorry.” He swallowed dryly. “No tell Gris.”

  “If I tell Gris you did sofocarse, he will not let you come to the big fiesta. And no more gringa madre for you ever again.”

  Employing whatever cogitating vapors were trapped within his skull, Coco contemplated his predicament. “I only play. I never never hurt the gringa madre for real—I was playing.”

  “Do something for me and I won’t tell Gris what you did.”

  “What you wanting?” asked Coco. “I cannot get you escape from here.”

  “I want information. I want to know if somebody’s still alive.”

  “Who?”

  “The blonde woman they brought here with me.”

  “What is her name?” inquired Coco.

  “Yvette.”

  “Ella es tu hermanita?”

  “Si,” Dolores responded, “she’s my little sister.”

 

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