Ochoa looked tired and sad. He returned his attention to the cards he was holding, then threw down the hand in disgust. His eyes were bloodshot. “What, Don Sebastián?” he said. “What is it?”
I’d never before seen Ochoa drunk, but I was not surprised by the sullen arrogance the tequila effected in him. Strong drink so easily agitates these primitives and sets loose the mob of resentments always lurking in their dark hearts. But I was feeling no more inclined than he toward the social amenities—and in any case I was not the least interested in his damned resentments, whatever they were. I shifted my stance slightly so that the rifle pointed his way less ambiguously. He flicked his eyes at the weapon and sneered.
“You were to bring him to me,” I said.
“Ah,” he said. He glanced toward the cell. “Him. Yes, well, I would have, you see, but I have a duty. A duty to justice.”
One of the others laughed, a sergeant, and Ochoa grinned at him and took a drink. The bottle was nearly empty.
“Listen, God damn you—”
“No, Don Sebastián,” he said. “You listen. I telegraphed my report of his arrest to headquarters in Hermosillo, and they told me a magistrate will be passing through in a few days. He’ll give him a trial and then we’ll hang him, all legal and proper. If it will make you happy, we’ll use your rope. If it will make you happier, you can have his carcass. You can have him butchered and dine on him every night until there’s nothing left but the bones. Hell, you can make soup from the bones till you’ve had the last miserable drop of him.” His two men were grinning whitely, much entertained.
“Damn your lowborn insolence,” I said. “I want him now.”
Ochoa’s smile vanished and he spat on the floor. “You people!” he said. “I want, I want! You hacendados want everything! God damn it, do you think you’re the only ones who want? You think you’re the only one who ever got fucked? You think you’re the only one who ever wanted to get even?”
The impudent whoreson! Daring to speak to me in that manner! Daring to refuse me! Rojas was right there, not a dozen feet from me, and this ignorant peon had the audacity to deny him to me. I’d had enough. I brought the rifle up, aimed it squarely in his face and thumbed back the hammer with a loud double click.
“Even a Cabrillo don,” he said, looking as if he were about to smile again, “knows what happens if he shoots a rurales captain.”
“Yes,” I said. “The rurales captain dies.”
My hands and voice were steady. The quivering was all in my heart—because I was certain I would have to shoot him, and then, of course, his underlings would all immediately shoot me. They would kill me while Rojas watched from his cell. And thus, from this tiny distance, he would escape me after all. The injustice of it filled me with a raging sadness.
For a moment no one moved, and then Ochoa sighed heavily and threw up his hands in resignation. “To hell with it,” he said, and stood up. “You or the hangman, what’s the difference? Why the hell should I care?” From a peg on the wall he took a large metal key ring with a single key on it and unlocked the cell door and swung it open.
“Out,” he said.
Juan Rojas stepped into the light. He was smaller than I had imagined, both short and slight, but he looked to have strength, and his eyes were as bright and quick as a hawk’s. With black hair hung to his shoulders and a red bandanna headband to hold it out of his eyes, he looked like an Indian. A Yaqui.
Ochoa ordered him to turn around, then bound his hands behind him with a length of rawhide cord. I lowered the rifle to my hip but kept it pointed at Ochoa, then told the sergeant to fetch two fresh horses, saddled and equipped with full canteens. The sergeant looked at Ochoa and Ochoa nodded.
While we waited, Rojas stared at me inquisitively but without fear. You’ll soon find out, I thought, looking at him. If he read the hatred in my eyes, he gave no sign of it. Ochoa sat at the table, sipping at the last of the bottle and softly singing a love song.
And then the sergeant was calling from the street. I peeked out the door to see a pair of horses in front of the jail—and a dozen rurales spread out across the street, all of them with carbines.
Ochoa laughed and said, “Did you think he would bring a brass band and girls with flowers to see you on your way?”
I jabbed the rifle muzzle under Rojas’ chin and glared at Ochoa. “I’ll settle here if I have to,” I said. But my heart howled at the possibility that I might be forced to kill him so quickly, with so little pain.
“Jesus, man,” Ochoa said. “I hope it never gets me as bad as it’s got you.”
He went to the door and ordered his men to rest easy. Then we all walked out and Ochoa told a couple of his boys to help Rojas get on a horse. I mounted up and took Rojas’ reins too, still expecting Ochoa at any moment to give his men the order to shoot me. But he merely stood with his thumbs hooked on his gunbelt and watched as I led Rojas’ mount away at a canter.
A few hours later the sun blazed up out of the distant mountains and layered the rocky landscape with a hard gold light. We rode in silence through the long shadows of the saguaros. Those early hours of the ride back toward La Luna Plata with Rojas in my custody—to do with as I wished!—were glorious. Never in my life had I desired anything so greatly as to have this man in my power. I had desired it with all my soul, dreamed of it, even prayed for it. And now, there we were, the two of us, deep in the desert and on our way to the things I had in store for him. Sweet Mary, my joy throbbed!
The sun was high above the mountains when I realized I was laughing out loud. I had no idea how long I’d been doing it. I looked behind me at Rojas and my good humor vanished instantly. The bastard was smiling.
I jerked the lead rope and his horse lunged up alongside mine. Rojas sat easily in the saddle even with his hands tied behind him.
“You think something’s funny, you son of a whore?” They were the first words I’d spoken to him.
He shrugged. “A man in the desert, laughing at nothing—that’s funny, no?”
I shuddered with the urge to shoot him in his grinning teeth. “Let me tell you some things,” I said. “Let’s see how funny you think they are.”
I talked steadily as our horses paced side by side and the sun climbed higher in the copper sky. I told him—in the most precise and intimate detail—the plan I had for him once we reached the main house. I told him about the little dungeon I’d fashioned in the windowless cellar and the playthings I’d collected there. I spoke to him of scorpions and fire ants and fierce yellow wasps, of venomous spiders whose bite would make a man sick for days. I had jarfuls of all of these things in that dark cellar with the thick stone walls. There were ropes and wires, steel hooks dangling from the ceiling. There were skinning razors and sharp iron spikes, fine long cactus spines and shards of broken glass. There would be buckets of boiling water, pots of caustic lyes. For his thirst, there would be tankards of goat piss. The furnace would burn day and night, and in it were the branding irons.
The more I spoke of it, the faster my breath came. He listened as raptly as a child hearing a fantastic tale. And then he suddenly laughed. “Jesus Christ, man! How many guys do you think I am? You want to do all that, you’re going to need more guys to do it to, because I don’t think I can make it past the first few things you got in mind. What’s got you so damned mad, anyway? All this crazy shit—spiders and goat piss! Jesus! What the hell did I ever do to you?”
He couldn’t have stunned me more if he’d spit in my face. I could see that he meant it—he did not know who I was, other than somebody of the hundreds who for one reason or another wanted him dead.
It was outrageous.
I drew my pistol and lashed him hard across the face, knocking him off his horse. I slid from the saddle and grabbed him by the hair and pressed the muzzle hard against his eye. I told him who I was in yells, bellowed my complaint into his face. I hit him with the gun again and let him fall into the dust.
With his hands fast behind
him, it was a struggle for him to sit up, but he made it. Blood streamed from his nose and fell in bright drops on his dirty white shirt.
“Cabrillo,” he said, and ran his tongue over his torn lips as though he was tasting the name. Then he smiled all the way up to his eyes. “Cabrillo! Goddamn, man, I know you!” He spat a red streak and laughed.
“A rolling gallows! What kind of crazy bastard thinks up something like that? Man, you know how tight that noose got from him bouncing up and down on that rope? It pinched his neck to no bigger around than my dick. It stretched his neck a foot! Another few miles and his head would’ve come off—what was left of it. The crows had worked it over pretty good. Ate up his eyes, his lips—”
He choked on blood, coughed and spat red. He grinned at me with his shattered red teeth. He must have seen my confusion in my eyes. “A couple of your boys spoke your name when they were begging me to spare them. They were only following your orders, they said. They were only escorting the gallows to Nogales as you commanded. But I shot them anyway—for being such scared little girls and for not keeping the birds off my brother’s face.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right—or even what I was thinking.
“You goddamn hacendados,” Rojas said. “You live in forts. You got an army of guys to protect you. You got the goddamn rurales. How’s a guy like me supposed to get even with a guy like you?” He paused to spit again. His grin now turned sly and his eyes blazed like little coalfires. “But you say that little hacienda on the Río Magdalena belonged to you? The beautiful red-haired woman with the mother-belly was your woman?” He cackled like a delighted child.
I felt as though I’d been clubbed in the spine. For an instant the white sky whirled. The remote sierras shimmered in the rising heat. His laughter chewed at my ears.
“Believe me, señor,” he gasped, choking on blood and laughter, “please believe me—I had no idea she was your woman.”
“You’ll pay for it forever!” I yelled. “I’ll listen to your screams like music!” My words sounded hollow in my own ears.
“Hell, man, I never would have known,” he said through his laughter, “if you hadn’t told me.”
“I’ll give you pain so great, you’ll beg, you’ll beg me for death!”
He laughed with bloody spit running down his chin. “Thank you, señor,” he said. “Thank you a thousand times for letting me know I avenged my little brother after all. Thank you!”
“I’ll give you agony!” I shouted. I grabbed up handfuls of dust and flung them wildly. I whirled and kicked at the stones around me as though they were hateful things. “AGONY!” I screamed. “Every day! Every night!”
But he was talking right through my raging promises. “… skin like milk! And those tits, my God! Like cream candy with little cherry tips. But best of all was her cunt. Soft as—”
I screamed and threw myself on him, clubbing him with the gun. His head fell back and his eyes rolled up in their sockets. I straddled him and shook him by the shirt collar, shrieking, “You’ll beg me to kill you and end your pain, you will!” I was weeping now, crying like a child. “Every day you’ll plead for your death, you’ll pray to me for your death! And sometimes I’ll say yes, and you’ll want to kiss me, you’ll call me Jesus Christ, you’ll ask God to bless me for eternity for so kindly killing you. But then, you worthless bastard son of an Indian whore … I WON’T DO IT!”
He coughed and choked and started coming around, and I raised the pistol to hit him again—and then suddenly realized what I was doing. I jumped up and backed away from him as if he were on fire. I was horrified. In my rage I had been about to destroy the only thing I had left to live for.
He wormed his way a few feet over to a small rock outcrop, panting and grunting with his efforts, and worked his way into a sitting position with his back against the rock. His broken face was caked with blood and dirt.
I hastily holstered my pistol and folded my arms tightly across my chest. Hardness, I told myself, hardness! Maintain command! Steel yourself against the bastard’s taunts. The first thing I would do when we got to La Luna Plata would be to cut out his tongue.
“Oh please let my baby son live.”
He said it in a high mimicking voice and laughed at the look on my face. “That’s what she said to me, you hangman. I stripped her to her earrings and she said, ‘Oh please let my baby son live.’ “ He spat blood at me. “Well, listen to this: I put it to her like one of your goddamn branding irons! She was begging me to—”
I shot him and shot him and shot him—howling even as I emptied the pistol into his grinning trickster’s face, howling with the horrifying realization of what I was doing, howling as the gunshots faded into the foothills …
As, here in this house of howling men, I have been howling ever since.
THREE TALES OF THE REVOLUTION
THE SOLDADERA
In 1913 my grandaunt Adela ran away with a boy intent on joining Pancho Villa’s Army of the North. She was sixteen. The Revolution promised freedom from tyrants such as Diaz and Huerta—from her own father, the cavalry colonel who venerated them both. The family was landed, rich, its blue veins but slightly darkened with the Indio blood it long denied. Only Adela’s youngest brother did not disown her. We still have the faded photograph he framed, clipped from a Chihuahua newspaper, showing Villa and Carranza standing side by side and squinting in dusty sunlight and mutual distrust—and there, directly behind them, her arms around the necks of fierce-faced compañeros, her breasts crossed with bandoleers, is Tía Adela. The boy she ran away with is not in the picture. Years later he showed up at my grandfather’s door on a crutch, one pant leg folded and pinned to a back pocket. He told tales of Adelita: how she rode on the packed roofs of boxcars jammed with horses and artillery; how she shot more federales in the battle of Zacatecas than anyone else in the brigade; how she danced around a campfire with Fierro the butcher and took a kiss on the mouth from Villa himself. How, at the horror of Celaya, she got caught on Obregón’s barbed wire and was shot to pieces by the machine guns.
THE COLONEL
From the veranda of the hillside mansion serving as our headquarters, I watched the firing squad do its work in the plaza below. The wailing of widows and wounded men carried up to mingle with the furious piano music from the ballroom behind me. In the plaza a federal captain stood against the church wall and made a hasty sign of the cross just before the rifle volley shook him and he fell dead on the cobblestones. As a labor detail dragged him away, the next man in the line of condemned stepped up to the wall: a hatless whitehaired colonel who stood at attention. The captain in charge of the executions raised his saber and gave the commands: “Ready!… Aim!… Fire!” The rifles thundered and the colonel rebounded off the wall and dropped to the ground. And then slowly, awkwardly, as the spectators gasped and began to raise a great jabbering, he got to his feet and slumped against the wall.
The riflemen looked at the captain. The captain stared at the colonel—and then thrust his saber up and yelled, “Ready!” I had never seen one get back on his feet before. “Aim!” The old man pushed off the wall and stood weaving, trying to square his shoulders. “Fire!” He bounced off the wall and fell in a heap. Then pushed up on his elbows. Then made it to his hands and knees. The crowd hushed utterly. People blessed themselves and knelt in the street. I thought, holy shit.
The captain spotted me and yelled, “What now, my general?” With twelve bullets in him the old man sat on his heels with his shoulder against the wall. He brushed vaguely at the blood soaking his tunic.
“Once more!” I ordered. “If he’s still breathing after the next one, we’ll give him a clean uniform and command of a regiment.”
The colonel was on one knee and still trying to rise when the next volley hit him. I rued not having spoken to him before he died.
THE TRIUMPH
We looted the city to its bones. Whatever we didn’t want or couldn’t take we destroyed. Every grievance we had against
the bluebloods, the Spanish, the Church, the bosses, against our own fathers, against life, we redressed against Zacatecas. The streets ran with blood. We shot military prisoners standing against the wall, priests kneeling at the altars, rich bastards groveling on the floors of their fine big houses. We packed the mineshafts with corpses, piled and burned them in the streets. A little boy watching the flames constricting the tendons of the blackening dead cried, “Look, mamá! They’re dancing!” We rode horses into the mansion salons, grinding horseshit into parquetry, shredding Middle Eastern carpets to rags. Into roaring fireplaces we threw books, ledgers, letters, photographs. Not a sculpture in town went unbroken, not a windowpane stayed intact. Our soldaderas paraded the streets in silk dresses, in bridal gowns of delicate lace trailing in the dust. Their feet scuffed the cobbles in satin slippers. We picked the churches clean of their gold and silver. We stripped houses, stores, stables of everything that could be carried away. Toward our trains flowed a steady stream of stock and wagons loaded with strongboxes, stoves, furniture, clothes, gilt picture frames and chandeliers. Every automobile in town that still ran was driven onto the flatcars. The mules walked stiff-legged under loads of booty. The wagons creaked with the weight of it. The trains groaned. It was our greatest victory in the war against the oppressions of the rich. As we pulled out of Zacatecas the air was heavy with the odors of smoldering ashes, blood-dampened dust, enemy flesh going to rot. All the powerful smells of triumph.
UNDER THE SIERRA
The mountains were blazing under a high sun when the first tremor passed through the cornfield. It rolled lightly over the low hill flanking the cemetery and rippled into the village of Sombra de Dios. It shook dust from the walls and roofs and rattled crockery and tins. All singing, all laughter, all gossip ceased. The animals fell silent in their pens. The only sound was of Paco Cantu’s one-eyed white dog, whining and turning in tight circles in the middle of the muddy street. Women at their cookpots took quick account of their children. Girls at the creekbank made swift signs of the cross and hastily gathered their wash.
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