The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King

by The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King- A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt

  “Colonel, the beans are your own good fortune, but we’ll take the tobaccy.”

  I didn’t pause, or reflect on what my unmasking of this trick outlaw might mean. “Red Finnegan, you swore an oath to the Rough Riders.”

  “That’s a damn shame,” he uttered as he took off his neckerchief. “I’ve grown fond of you and the Riders. I was planning to let you live. But now you’ll tattle.”

  He must have requisitioned two of the insurrectos, gotten them drunk with the dream of what they could make with a stash of tobacco that was trading at fifty gringo dollars for a couple of ounces.

  “And all that pilfering among the troopers—the gold watches and other missing items—was that you, Finnegan?”

  His eyebrows quivered. “I guess I was born to it.”

  “But you were as gallant as any trooper in that first charge. I saw you myself. You helped us take the ridge.”

  “Oh, when it comes to fightin’, I’m as fine as the next fellah. But I had tobaccy on my mind the minute we landed—red and brown gold. And what does Mr. Taggart have to say?”

  Taggart was silent. He couldn’t draw on that gunslinger. But the other Pinks stood a step or two to the side on that road of red ants. They didn’t want to interfere with Taggart’s play. There was a terrific racket in the trees. A troop of monkeys was shadowing us; the troop chattered and yelped and hurled an arsenal of coconuts at us, their lean arms extending out of the fronds like hairy fulcrums. I ducked, or I would have left my brains on El Camino Real. I didn’t want the mules to bolt. They would have vanished into the jungle and shed all our supplies in some obscure trap of tangled roots. I had to hug their reins and pull against the load on their backs.

  Red Finnegan created his own folly with a maniacal laugh. He shot the monkeys out of the fronds with his Colt repeater. The monkeys dropped their coconuts, tumbled onto El Camino Real, clawing at the air until they expired. Finnegan couldn’t seem to lose that wretched laugh.

  “You had no cause to kill those damn monkeys,” Taggart told him. “They were funnin’ with you, Red.”

  “And I’m funnin’ with you.”

  Taggart was no quick-draw artist. Red could have shot the eyes out of his skull; that was his signature move.

  “I’ll take the tobaccy, Colonel, and you can sing your prayers. Hallelujah to the Lord!”

  That’s when I heard the birdsongs again, the tweets doubling and tripling until it was a riot of songs, a roar, and I knew that the Vaqueros were following this escapade, like some kind of chorus. Their Mausers struck the trees over our heads, with little explosions that left splinters in the bark. They weren’t aiming to kill. Finnegan turned his head a trifle, and Taggart shot him in the cheek with his Colt. Blood splattered onto my specs and the tarpaulins that held our supplies in place.

  The two other men ran into the jungle. I had to wipe my specs with a cloth. There was no wind in Red at all.

  “Colonel, I think we should bury the son of a bitch right here.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “There’ll have to be an inquiry.”

  Taggart had the saturnine look of an old soldier lost in the fray. “You’ll crush the regiment, sir. The provost-marshal will want his own inquiry. His advocates will swoop down on us from Washington, and meanwhile the Rough Riders will be in limbo. The advocates will wonder how many other renegade Rough Riders there are—if your cowboys can be trusted at all—and we’ll sit out the rest of the war.”

  This damn assassin was as sharp as any advocate-general, so we carried Red’s corpse to our camp on the back of a mule. I had to swallow my own bile. I blamed the bullet in Red’s cheek on the Vaqueros. We buried him in a grove, with the padre reading from an Army Bible and worrying about the snipers in the trees. He was shivering all the time in this heat, with a handkerchief over his ears like a curtain. One padre had already been killed. Those tree-huggers shot our field hospitals to pieces; their savagery multiplied the more we sat in our camp.

  I had Winters-White come to my tent. The ex-newsie’s hands no longer shook and his eyes didn’t wander now that he had his tobacco. I kept our tins and bags of Bull Durham in my tent, but we donated half our tobacco to other regiments and the general staff to avert a civil war. But spies, like vultures, lurked everywhere, and the stash we still had was always kept under guard. Finnegan wasn’t shrewd enough to steal his own supply from the commissary clerks, but he hadn’t been wrong—tobaccy was better than gold.

  “Will, you know all the correspondents and reporters. They treat you like a deity. You’ve covered pogroms and forest fires. You’ve traveled from conflict to conflict. You’ve met with the Czar in his summer palace. I shouldn’t need to remind you. The Vaqueros have to have a leader—find him, even if he’s a ghost.”

  “And what if I fail?” he averred, with tobacco stains on his teeth.

  “You’re a wonder, Will.”

  He left with an ounce of tobacco, which I measured with a spoon and a little cup.

  “Roosevelt, you’re the deity,” he said, “not I. And your father was even a bigger deity. I’m only here because of Brave Heart.”

  I felt a bit abashed. “Papa was devoted to the newsies,” I said. “That’s true, but you got here on your own cunning, Will.”

  He was quiet for a moment, summoning up the difficult days and nights of a newsie. “You cannot possibly imagine what it meant to have him there week after week in his tie and tails. . . .”

  Will returned in an hour with his yellow slicker and his Colt. “Colonel, come with me. Don’t forget your sword and your carbine and your cartridge belt . . . and a little gift of Bull Durham.”

  “Where are we going?” I had to ask, clutching my own slicker.

  “To meet a ghost.”

  THEY INSISTED THAT I wear a blindfold. I had little choice. We wouldn’t have a padre left in another week. We couldn’t fight the Spanish regulars and these sinister cowboys in the trees.

  I tried to mark the time, pace by pace, as we traveled through the jungle. I could feel the corded roots at my feet. “Damn you, Will, why do I have to wear a sword?”

  “In case a boa attacks.”

  “But how can I fight a boa while I’m wearing a blindfold!” I had to insist.

  “No matter. A colonel wouldn’t be a colonel without his sword—this is Cuba.”

  I had clocked twenty minutes, like pulse beats in my temples. Winters-White kept me from plummeting into that gnarled jungle floor. He tapped me on the shoulder and removed the blindfold. We were in a slight clearing, a bald patch without a single root or tree. And in this clearing was a canvas chair that might have come from a general’s tent. A man in a pince-nez and a cowboy neckerchief sat in that chair. I’d have guessed he was my age—a few months shy of forty. He had a jeweler’s nimble hands. His mustache was almost as red as mine, and his eyes were probably just as weak. I couldn’t imagine him as a sniper, shooting at children and nurses from the Army Nurse Corps. Yet here he was, in the green uniform of a Vaquero.

  “We’ve met before,” he said in a slight accent.

  “Captain, or general, or whoever you are, I rarely forget a face.”

  “Well,” he said, “it seems you have forgotten mine.”

  But I didn’t forget, you see. I had to rip him right out of his jungle habitat before I could master that camouflage of his. He’d been in my class at Columbia Law. Rueben Martinez. His father had been a peasant who broke into the merchant class with a cigar factory in Santiago, and had sent his oldest son to Manhattan to study law.

  “It was not amiable,” he said. “The winters, and all the poverty and the wealth. I did not graduate. I caught double pneumonia . . . and nearly died in Bellevue. But we often chatted.”

  “I cannot recall a word. Forgive me—are you a general or not?”

  He laughed and revealed his crooked teeth. His was the only chair. Will and I had to squat on our haunches.

  “Teedie, there are no titles here, not even a rank. We don’t use suc
h nonsense in the jungle.”

  “Yet you are the chieftain of the Vaqueros.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, “perhaps. I have followed both your careers in the papers. Mr. White is fond of traveling on a camel’s back. He can describe the sunset in Arabia.” The Vaquero shut his eyes and recited the correspondent’s words like an incantation. “ ‘The sky in Arabia is not red. It is bloodless, and bleaches the blood out of any man. The sun does not set—it dies in mid-sentence, and darkness hits like a hammer.’ Have I misquoted you, Mr. White?”

  “Not at all,” said Will.

  “Your beginnings were much more humble than mine, but I will not dwell on that. And Colonel, you cannot seem to outrun your own glory days. A sheriff in the Badlands, a Police Commissioner who got rid of corrupt captains, and now a colonel with his own regiment. What does your wife—your second wife—think of all this?”

  I wasn’t too fond of this fox with a jeweler’s hands. “She calls me Sinbad,” I said.

  He twirled his mustache, just a bit. “Sinbad, yes. That is perfection. Sinbad has come across the sea with his cowboys to liberate us from the hidalgos.”

  He presided on his canvas throne in the wild and pontificated like a jungle poet.

  “But the hidalgos have rounded up your own people and put them into camps. Why are you supporting them?”

  “Because I am a businessman,” he said, “in the business of war.”

  “I find that hard to believe, Don Rueben.”

  He snarled at me. “I’m nobody’s don. You can call me Coronel. Finally, I do have a rank. It’s the same as yours, Colonel Sinbad. The Spanish governor of Santiago pays me a small fortune to protect his province. And so I have my cowboys, too.”

  “But you cannot win. Your snipers shoot at little children and helpless nurses with armbands, not to mention a padre or two. That is not war. It is wanton cruelty.”

  “Anything,” he said, “anything to slow you down. The hidalgos are like a tottering wall. The whole Spanish conquest will crumble—it is crumbling as we speak. The generals hide in Santiago with most of their army. And they leave a thousand regulars in a blockhouse on a hill. Colonel, I am more frightened of you than that idiot of a Governor in his palace.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why?” I could see that Will was scribbling one of his dispatches—an interview in the raw, amid an army of red ants, with the elusive leader of the Vaqueros.

  “Because,” that other colonel said, “the Yankees have confused their own destiny with ours.”

  I wasn’t amused by this Plato of the forest, who was a soldier of fortune and a philosopher. I dangled a bag of Bull Durham. All his ranting stopped. He plucked the Bull Durham out of my hand with his tiny talons.

  “There is no tobacco here, Colonel—none. Couldn’t you spare another bag?”

  I did not have a second bag.

  “Don Rueben, enjoy your Bull Durham. I doubt that we’ll meet again. We will chase the Spaniards out of Cuba, erase their presence in the New World. The Governor will return to Madrid with half the wealth in the province.”

  “And we will have the Yankee invaders in our laps—no!”

  We listened to a piercing birdcall, and he answered the call with a staccato tweet of his own. He collected his canvas chair, and without a word of warning he vanished into the foliage.

  THERE WAS ANOTHER MATTER, not as urgent, but still a regimental folly, the kind a novice colonel could never expect in war. Sergeant Raddison came into my tent with Corporal Anton Little Feather of Troop H. The corporal was our standard-bearer. And he’d clubbed a few of the Spanish regulars with the Rough Rider flag. I’d inherited him from a school in the Indian Territory. He’d come to our recruitment counter with the highest letters of recommendation from his teachers, and his physical exam in hand, signed and sealed. I took great pride in the corporal—not a bravo among us had trained so hard.

  “We have a problem, sir,” Raddison said. “He is a she.”

  “Raddison, you’re talking riddles.”

  “Well, let me unriddle it. I caught him undressing, and the corporal has, ya know, female genitals.”

  “That’s preposterous,” I said. “Trooper, is that a lie—or a fact?”

  “A fact, sir,” Anton Little Feather said in a husky voice. He didn’t have one female feature, at least one that I could surmise. While he didn’t wear a mustache, his shoulders were as broad as mine.

  “What’s your real name, Corporal?”

  “Antonia Little Feather, sir.”

  I should have known. Little Feather was the name of a princess, not a Sioux warrior. But that had completely skipped my mind because of her corded neck and the sweep of her shoulders. Antonia had indeed been a pupil at a school in the Indian Territory. Her letters of recommendation were genuine. She was applying for the Army Nurse Corps. And she had passed the physical, too. But she craftily altered both documents. She had wanted so much to be a Rough Rider—she could shoot in the saddle and ride the roughest bronco. We’d climbed that razorback together at Las Guásimas, with her holding the colors while she fended off Spanish regulars. And she had guarded Little Texas after I got down from my chestnut cowpony. I tripped once on my own sword. And it was Antonia who pulled me back into the fray—the corporal was everywhere at once.

  “Sergeant,” I said, “I’m damned whatever I do; if I notify the provost, we’ll be laughed right out of the war.”

  “Then it might be best to notify no one,” Raddison volunteered.

  “And what if another bravo uncovers her female charms?”

  “That’s unlikely, sir.”

  “Doesn’t she use the latrine and the shower stalls?”

  “I shower after midnight,” the trooper insisted. “And the jungle is my private latrine.”

  I’d been duped. She’d lied and cheated and falsified legal documents to become a Rough Rider. But it meant as much to her as it meant to me. I’d created the Riders out of my own phantasm, an unbridled wish. The Riders were my Aladdin’s lamp, and perhaps Antonia was its genie—perhaps, perhaps.

  SHAFTER’S TOE MUST HAVE risen out of its burlap bag like an oracle. Finally, the order came to advance upon San Juan Heights, a pair of ridges actually, one lower than the other. The lower one we dubbed Kettle Hill, because it was a ruined ranch with a great iron kettle, which had once been used for sugar refining, I suppose. It was a deadly place, since it had its own red-tile blockhouse that commanded the hill. But right across the ravine was the upper crest, San Juan Hill, a hacienda with an infernal line of rifle pits and a red-tile blockhouse that was a regular fort, located on the cusp of El Camino Real, our only route to Santiago, mud and all.

  We were told to seize the Heights from two separate points, like a pincer. Our big guns were practically useless. Their black powder left a dark residue of smoke that gave the enemy a chance to punish us with their own big guns. Our Gatlings were another story. These hand-cranked guns on their swivel mounts raked the enemy with a relentless precision all along our lines of fire. We couldn’t have advanced without the Gatlings, couldn’t have scaled the Heights, but our dynamite gun did not have the same wallop. It was difficult to operate, yet its shells of nitroglycerin could rip into a rifle pit or explode in front of some abandoned blockhouse.

  Our orders arrived at four a.m. by a courier in a campaign hat with a missing crown—a bunch of us had to charge Kettle Hill. I do not remember much after that. I heard the bugle’s call, like the patchwork of a dream. I was caught up pell-mell in a brigade of Buffalo Soldiers and Rough Riders, horseless horsemen on the run, in the hurly-burly of war. The Spaniards had called our black bravos “smoked Yankees,” and considered them ghost warriors, who could rise up from the dead and reassemble all their body parts. The regulars ran from their rifle pits once the smoked Yankees arrived.

  I led the charge from my saddle. I had tucked my blue bandanna under the floppy brim of my campaign hat, so that it could protect the back of my neck from the bite of the morning sun
, and it must have looked strange to my boys, like the headdress of a sheikh. Thus I rode Little Texas into battle. Still, our Gatlings couldn’t rake every damn royal palm in the hills. The Vaqueros shot troopers on both sides of Little Texas. Yet there I was on my warhorse, escaping bullets with an invincible flair.

  Sinbad.

  I went up and down our lines, waving my hat with its blue tail. “Forward, boys, we have to take that hill.”

  But there were ranges of barbed wire strewn like the devil’s own instrument across our path. And I didn’t want to catch Little Texas’ flanks on a piece of that wire. So I climbed off my saddle and shooed that chestnut cowpony back to our camp with a swat of my hat. “Go on, now.”

  Little Texas galloped unharmed across a hail of bullets. And I continued my charge. I must have been caught in the tremor of an exploding shell. I tumbled to the ground, scraped my knee and smashed my specs; the steel frames were gone. I knew I had another pair in my hat, but I couldn’t seem to reach them somehow, as if my hands belonged to a marionette. All my preparations had gone awry. I had to push and grope into battle half blind. I’d lost that powerful compass in my head. I panicked, because I could have been slogging in the wrong direction.

  And then I tripped. A hand reached out and grabbed mine. A smoked Yankee had wandered out of the haze. It was Bellows, my former body-servant. “Colonel, what is a white man doing on his hands and knees?”

  “Looking for my specs, Bellows, why else? I got thrown into the wake of a shell.”

  “Well, ain’t that a catastrophe?” he said with a smile, as I caught a glimpse of his gold teeth.

  Thank the Lord he still had an extra pair that he kept for me in his pocket. I put them on, my hands shivering over the earpieces. I barely had time to salute Bellows. A bullet slapped him in the shoulder, spun him around. I cradled him in my arms. His eyes had that vacant, bleeding look.