Guns of the Waste Land: Departure: Volumes 1-2

by Leverett Butts

  Well, we walked at fair pace down the main road. I had to struggle to keep up with Ardiss, I generally had to walk fast for about three steps; then he’d get too far ahead of me, and I had to run to catch up. I dropped my last piece of bacon that way, and I don’t mind telling you, it broke my heart to do it, too. Ardiss didn’t look left or right as he walked, just straight ahead, but for the life of me, I couldn’t stop looking left, right, up, and around. I’d never seen so many people in my entire life. Everywhere I looked was people just walking around or talking just exactly like they wasn’t in the largest city God ever made.

  Across the street from Ardiss’ house I could see children, some not so much younger’n me and some barely knee-high to a sandtick, running around this wooden building sometimes the young’un chased the older ones, sometimes the older ones chasing the young’uns. Sometimes the girls chased the boys. I don’t think I seen the boys chasing the girls yet, which didn’t make a lick of sense to me. Maybe it was because I hadn’t never known no girl but Ma and these ones was so different, but I figured if I had leave to run in a yard, I’d be running after them not away from them like them boys was doing.

  Most everybody said hey to Ardiss when they seen him. Them children across the street all stopped running as soon as he set foot out his door and screamed his name.

  “Hey, Ardiss!” some of them yelled.

  “Yo Sheriff!” others hollered.

  Ardiss tried to speak to each one of them he recognized. “Good morning, Lucas. How are you this morning, Isabelle? Are you behaving yourself, Carey?” It was the only time he didn’t stare straight ahead and walk briskly. Once we passed the schoolhouse, though, he was all business.

  As we walked farther down the road I seen folks standing around on wooden walkways what run the length of town, not doing nothing just talking or sipping coffee, they was dressed all kinds of ways. Some was in dusty trousers and workshirts, others looked like they was going to church, their shoes was so shiny, and they wore ties. The women had on old calico like Ma wore or big ol’ hoopy things that made them look like they was floating around instead of walking. I didn’t see how they could keep them fancy clothes clean as dusty as everything was. All them hoopy dress women had little frilly umbrellas with them, so I figured they used them as kind of like shields or something when the dust rose up or whatever, cause there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

  When they hollered out to him, Ardiss would most always smile, and tip his hat to ladies and nod to the men. He’d generally say good morning to them, but he didn’t call them by name, and he didn’t stop to talk like he done with them, kids.

  Directly we came to the end of the road and Ardiss crossed over to this big barn-looking building, only I bet it coulda held two of our barns back home. As we walked in, Ardiss looked around, took off his hat and tapped it against his thigh.

  “Ho, Braddock!” he hollered as we moved further into the barn, and I caught the grassy smell of horse dung before I noticed the rows of stalls running down each side of the barn. “Where you at?”

  “I’m coming, Mist’ Ardiss,” the voice came from overhead as a pile of hay come flying out of seemed like nowhere and landed in the middle of the barn with a thud. “Just lemme climb down a minute.”

  “Well,” Ardiss sounded like he was irritated, but I could tell he was just fooling, “take your time, Braddock. I got all day to maintain law and order in this town. I’m just bringing you that help we talked about is all.”

  “That Percy?” the voice sounded like Ardiss had just give him a birthday present, and it wasn’t his birthday. Then a gray-headed black man in a canvas apron come from around a corner grinning from ear to ear through a fringe of beard. “Lord A’mighty, Ardiss, I didn’t expect to see him for another week at least.”

  “I don’t know what to tell, you, Braddock,” Ardiss put his hand between my shoulders and gently pushed me forward, “Boy woke up yesterday evening, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Doc says it’s alright to get him out and about, so here he is.”

  The man kneeled down, grabbed my shoulders, and looked me over like he was inspecting a new horse. He looked at my eyes, my mouth, he run his hands in my hair.

  “If he ain’t the spitting image of ol’ Jim,” he said looking up at Ardiss, “I’ll eat horse shit.”

  “You knew my Pa?” I asked.

  “I reckon you could say that,” Braddock chuckled. “I used to work for his family way back ‘fo the war.”

  Ardiss chuckled, too, and shook his head. “Work,” he said and chuckled again.

  “Well it wasn’t play, that’s fo’ damn sure.”

  I didn’t know what in tarnation they was talking about, but I was grinning just the same.

  “Lawd, don’t he smile like him, too?” Braddock stood up and winked at Ardiss. “Bet them womens better look out for him, too.”

  “Don’t grow him up yet, Braddock,” Ardiss looked down at me, and his tone got kind a serious like. “Let him be child a bit longer, hey?”

  “I ain’t got nothing to do with it, boss,” Braddock said. “Boy grows when he wants to.”

  “Or needs to,” Ardiss said quietly. “Well, boy,” he patted me on the head, “I reckon I’ll leave you with Braddock, here, and he can find something to occupy you.” Then he put his hat back on and turned to go. “Come on back to the house when Braddock gets down with you.” He said as he left. “I’ll have Emmie hold dinner for you.”

  Chapter Four – Guernica

  I.

  She stands on the ramparts of Fort Joye and watches the horizon just as she has done every evening for the week. She loves the way the setting sun casts rays of yellow and orange and red piercing into the blue purple of the darkening sky like an Indian blanket. Each evening the pattern is different, but each evening the spectacle brings her a comfort she has found all too lacking in her life.

  I thought leaving would fix this, she thinks as her eye catches the silhouette of a vulture soaring across the deep yellow of the sky, but it has brought me no peace, no comodidad. She knows the women will be talking in Bretton by now. She can all but hear them:

  “Well, good riddance, I say. Spic trollop.”

  “Can you imagine it? Carrying on like that with her husband’s best friend, right under his nose even.”

  “A cryin’ shame, I say, drivin’ a wedge like that between two old friends. I mean sure it takes two to tango, but you cain’t really fault Lancaster. I mean we all know how them Mexicans throw themselves at anything in trousers. A man can only hold off temptation so long.”

  “Don’t I just know it? I was saying to my Daniel just the other day. I said, ‘I don’t know why anyone’s surprised it happened. I mean anyone with eyes to see could know she didn’t never care nothing for Ardiss. Just riding him for what she could get out of him ‘til something better come along.’ They’re all the same, you know?”

  She knows they say this now because she had heard them whisper the same things when Isadora had left her husband Mark for his nephew, Trevor, last year. It mattered nothing to them that before Isadora had eloped, every one of them found it horrifying that she had been pressured by her family to marry a much older man she didn’t love. They found it oh so terribly romantic that she and Trevor had apparently fallen in love; some even went so far as to provide alibis for one or both of the young lovers to meet in secret trysts throughout the spring and summer, right up until the morning Trevor and Isadora disappeared together.

  Then the furia of the outraged townswomen descended. How dare the Spanish whore treat Mark so? A man who had taken her in when she was penniless and brought her up to a level of respectability even with a white woman?

  The fact that almost to a woman each of these mujeres had arrived in Bretton by way of the Gilded Lily as one of Celia’s pérdidas seemed to have slipped their memories.

  Oh, Guernica thinks, watching the vulture circle the sky, dip, then fly off, they will talk, and they will judge, but they do not know. They think th
ey know, but they cannot.

  “And don’t you just know she done did something to keep from giving him a son,” she could imagine them saying, “Couldn’t have it come out looking like Lancaster could she?”

  They couldn’t know the truth, but they would not know it if she told them. Their truth was much more interesting.

  II.

  Ardiss had wanted a child from the first. But it hadn’t been in the cards. For years they had hoped, then every month the courses ran normally, and Ardiss would sink into a gloom. He tried to hide it, but Guernica knew. He smiled less, his eyes wandered more to the schoolhouse across the road. They had built the house here precisely for the proximity of the school. Ardiss had enjoyed the idea of watching their children throughout the day through his study, or of walking over from the jail at the lunch hour to eat with his family.

  Now, however, the schoolhouse stood not as a promise of what he could have, but as a laughing, screaming reminder of what he couldn’t.

  At first, Guernica suspected the problem lay with Ardiss. Yes, there were things a woman could do to prevent or stop a child. In fact, Celia had made it her mission to teach one of her ladies these methods, but Guernica had never needed them. At first, she believed the preventatives had done their job exceedingly well in her case. She never found need of the abortives. However, when she began her affair with Lancaster, she did not take up these methods again. If she found herself with child, she knew Ardiss would believe it was his because he wanted it to be.

  Still her courses ran true and like clockwork.

  Ardiss never blamed Guernica, but now she suspected the problem. Señor Malevolo’s parting gift.

  After his first visit, Guernica no longer protested when Señor Malevolo appeared in her room after dinner. At first, he appeared only once, maybe twice, each time he and Delores visited the farm. However, as their visits grew more frequent, so, too, did his visits to her chamber until he appeared almost every night.

  She had hoped that merely acquiescing to his advances would pacify him, and at first, they did. In fact, Desiderio seemed unaware, at first, of Guernica at all as he moved atop her. During these times, as she lay on her back while the old man thrust feebly at her body, sweating as if he were working a field in the noon sun, Guernica would stare through the small window above the headboard of her bed at the bright disc (or sliver depending on the time of month) of the moon peeking at her through the branches of the tree which grew just outside her room.

  She would imagine herself leaving her body through that window and climbing to the furthest edge of the nearest branch. There she could see herself reaching into the night sky and plucking the moon from the firmament as if it were a silver apple waiting especially for her hand. She would then sit crossed legged on the tip of her branch with the moon held firmly in her hand, slowly biting it, tasting the sugary sweetness of its beams as they coursed steadily down her throat to settle comfortingly into her belly until she had devoured it entire.

  By this time, Desiderio would jerk her violently back to herself as he spasmed finally and rolled off her.

  “Put your head under the pillow,” he would command each time and wait until she had done so before rising from the bed. She had to remain thus, naked on the bed and blind until he had dressed again and moved to the door. “I want huevos and chorizo in the morning,” he would say as he opened the door and left. Only after he pulled the door completely shut, would Guernica be allowed to remove the pillow, pull her nightgown back on, and crawl under the covers.

  Eventually, though, Malevolo understood that Guernica’s silence was not the silence of subjugation but of escape. Guernica never knew what caught his attention, but one night, just as she was about to pluck the full, ripe moon from the sky, she felt a searing pain across her face as the old demon backhanded her without so much as breaking his rhythm.

  “Pay attention, puta,” he breathed harshly. “Look me in the eyes until I say otherwise.”

  “Si, Desi,” she whispered. “Si.”

  “And you may no longer call me that,” he snarled. “If I am not worthy of your attention, you are not worthy of my name. Call me Maestro when I am here, Señor during the day.”

  “Si, Des—Maestro.”

  “Put your head under the pillow. I am done with you.”

  “Si, Maestro.”

  Guernica’s days took on a new pattern. By day, she toiled under the demanding glare of Dolores. She was expected to cook, clean, mend clothes and anything else Señora Malevolo deemed necessary, and she was a bitter mistress.

  “Señor does not wish you to be marked,” she never failed to remind Guernica, “by anyone besides him, but I know how not to leave marks.” She never failed to illustrate this either.

  At night, she belonged to Desiderio. He made her close her window now to remove any distraction. He later made her nail it shut.

  She never told Leonardo what happened. If I tell him, he will kill them, and the Federales will execute him, and me probably. Best to stay silent. It cannot go on forever.

  Her father was not stupid, though. He knew his daughter was suffering, though how much he knew no one would ever know. He felt as powerless as his daughter. A life of misery, he reasoned, is better than no life at all. As soon as they return to their home, we will leave. They cannot stay forever.

  Weeks became months, and as winter drew on, the Malevolos showed no signs of leaving. In fact, wagons arrived with new furnishings, and one morning, Leonardo spied his furniture, the furniture he had made as a young groom for his bride, broken and piled behind the house. When he asked about it, one of the wagoner’s informed him that la señora had decreed the basura be disposed of to make room for their belongings.

  Still Leonardo said nothing. It is not junk, he told himself, but it is not worth dying for. Our time will come. It must.

  By harvest, Guernica knew something was wrong. She had missed her courses twice, and one morning, she awoke nauseated and found her undergarment fit slightly tighter than it had before. Examining herself in the mirror, she saw nothing amiss, but she knew. How long before others notice it? She wondered as she prepared the morning meal. What will Papi say? She looked through the kitchen doors to the dining table and Desidero waiting for his huevos. She tried almost successfully to hide a sudden grin. Maestro’s days, she thought trying again to straighten her mouth, are numbered, and it is a small number.

  III.

  The sun has sunk completely, and the sky has gone from violet to a deep indigo, almost black. Guernica moves to the opposite rampart and stares patiently at the horizon there. She feels more than hears him walk up behind her. A sudden and almost imperceptible rise in temperature as his body behind hers blocks the breeze. Then the comforting grasp of his hand on her shoulder. She leans back against his chest as the hand continues forward to rest atop her bosom.

  “Gettin’ dark, lassie,” he says softly, his brogue both rough and comforting, like whiskers across her cheek. “Out here, darkness means cold, and I note you’ve not brought yer wrap.”

  “I was going in soon,” she explains. “I just wanted to see the moon rise.”

  “Would ye be wantin’ company for that?” Lancaster whispers into her ear as he brings his other arm around her waist. “Or is it something you need solitude for?”

  “Please stay, Lankestar. I would like that,” Guernica snuggles back into his embrace. “Very much.”

  Above them the full moon rises from the horizon, hanging in the sky like a silver apple, ripe for plucking.

  IV.

  Delores and Desiderio were arguing when Guernica brought their breakfast to them, but she could not hear what they were arguing about. As soon as she swung into the dining area carrying a plate in each hand, they stopped talking, though they still stared daggers at each other. Delores looked away from her husband when Guernica bent over to set one of the plates before him. Her eyes settled instead on Guernica’s belly, decidedly larger now, though not so much that she couldn’t n
ormally hide it under her looser blouses, when not bent over a table serving or on all fours scrubbing the floor.

  “How are you feeling this morning?” Delores asked the girl when she bent over to place the second plate before her mistress.

  “I am fine, señora,” Guernica replied softly, “gracias.”

  Desiderio glared at his wife and cleared his throat.

  “It is just,” Delores’ voice soft, icysmooth, and piercing, “I thought I heard you vomitar this morning.”

  Guernica stumbled at this as she moved to the kitchen. “No, señora.” She replied steadying herself. “It was just a little indigestion. I had a bad patata last night.”

  “Hmph,” Delores sounded doubtful.

  When Guernica had returned to the kitchen, she heard the sound of flesh slapping flesh and Delores cried out, startled.

  “Vaya!” Desiderio yelled. “Leave me be!”

  It had been a few weeks, and Guernica knew she would not be able to hide her condition from her father much longer. She had worried about it for months, but she still found herself no closer to knowing how to tell Leonardo. When he found out, she was sure, he would want to cut their master from cockles to scalp, so at best, she would have to tell him when they had left the farm, which they showed no signs of doing. At worst, she’d have to wait until Desiderio’s men were away, so when he did what he would inevitably do, the two of them could escape. But no such chance had been found, and she grew heavier by the day.

  Now, as her father chopped wood for the evening fire just outside, she bent over the scrub water bucket washing the floors, running it over and over in her mind, but still no closer to a solution. So intent was she, that she never heard the footsteps approach, nor the door close behind her until she felt the sharp piercing pain of a foot kicking into her belly and the cobbled floor hitting her head as she fell on her side.