Death Rattle tb-8

by Terry C. Johnston

  But none of that mattered now that he and Big Nigger, along with at least two dozen more Pueblos, had confronted their most despised enemy that afternoon on the outskirts of town. After the American governor had slipped through their mob, Tomas and Big Nigger rallied hundreds to follow them into Taos, intending to free their compatriots who were rotting in the Americans’ jail.

  The Americano called Lee—he was the man who had imprisoned Tomas’s friends from the Pueblo.

  Well after dark when the mob noisily burst into the jail brandishing guns, butcher knives, and torches, they caught the surprised sheriff scrambling off his cot in his longhandles. Several of the Indians grabbed the sheriff and dragged him to Tomas’s feet.

  “Set our friends free!” Tomas demanded.

  “No,” Lee said in English.

  Even Tomas could understand that, what little of the enemy’s language he understood. He slapped Lee across the mouth, which spurred a loud chorus from the crowd pressing in around them, eager to watch how Tomas would open the cell doors. Tomas glanced at Big Nigger for approval. The Delaware nodded slightly.

  “Open the cages, gringo!” Tomas growled before he slammed a bony fist into the middle of Lee’s face.

  Blood spurted from the sheriff’s nose, oozing freely over his mouth and bare chin. It took a moment for Lee’s eyes to focus again.

  The American licked the warm blood from his lower lip, then centered his gaze on Tomas. “No.”

  Tomas slammed his’fist into the sheriff’s face again, then again, and another time too. With each blow he watched how Lee’s head snapped back, then lolled forward until he could open his eyes—likely fighting unconsciousness every time.

  “Stop! Stop this, I say!”

  Tomas wheeled at the sound of the voice crying out in Spanish—wondering why one of the Mexican conspirators was demanding a halt to this torture. The crowd surrounding Tomas was grumbling with ugly intent as they rolled this way and that.

  “You lawless scum!” the voice ridiculed the mob.

  More shrieks from Tomas’s rebels as the thin Mexican shoved his way toward the steps of the jail where Tomas gripped the front of Lee’s bloody longhandles in his fists.

  “By all that’s holy!” Cornelio Vigil growled as he came to a halt four feet away. “Not one of you are worthy to stand before a man of God!”

  “So, it is you, Vigil! Friend to the American tormentors!” Tomas shrieked when he recognized the Mexican official.

  “Malditos usted! I’ll kill you with my bare hands,” the prefect vowed. “Free that man and go back to your Pueblo. Break this up now and I’ll deal with you tomorrow—”

  Suddenly two of the Indians leaped forward, seizing Vigil’s arms.

  “Let me go, you snakes! Let me go!” the prefect ordered his manhandlers. “You should tremble to even lay a hand on me!”

  With a strident laugh, Tomas screamed, “We aren’t your inferiors now, Prefect!”

  Two more large Indians squatted at the Mexican’s knees and hoisted the struggling Vigil completely into the air. The prefect scuffled, flailing his arms and bellowing what he planned to do about this unthinkable act of rebellion by his inferiors. He reminded them he was their better, from a noble class—a group of people who sought to help the Americans because it was good for business.

  But this was the moment it fell to both the poor of the Pueblo and Taos itself to reclaim New Mexico for its native peoples.

  “Scoundrels and scum!” Vigil screamed at them as four of the mob dragged him off the steps at the front of the jail and into the center of the street. “Disperse now or your lives will be forfeit!”

  Tomas released the groggy sheriff for the moment. He could come back for Lee in a few minutes. For now he followed the four through the surging crowd. “What do you think of your poor peons now, Vigil?”

  “En el nombre de Dios, you’ll hang for this!” the prefect shouted.

  “No—you’ll hang!”

  “If you’d fight me fairly like a man,” Vigil was shrieking, spittle crusted at the corners of his mouth, “I’d show your kind for the cowards you are—rebel scum!”

  “Kill him!” Tomas suddenly yelled.

  In less than a heartbeat the four keepers dropped the prefect onto the icy street before the throng collapsed over Vigil. Tomas heard the Mexican screaming in agony, watched the dozen or more arms rise and fall, the machetes and scythes, hoes and butcher knives rising after each descent, more and more blood glistening on and dripping from their blades.

  Suddenly a disembodied arm was brandished overhead. Then a lower leg, with pieces of Vigil’s boot still dangling from a nearly severed foot. Tomas was just about to shove his way into the mob when a dark, round object was hurtled into the sky by one of the murderers. It sailed down into the crowd, but was caught and immediately tossed into the air again. Up and down the spinning object ascended into the flickering torchlight as Tomas slowly recognized it for what it was.

  Vigil’s patrician head—a look of horror frozen forever on his features.

  After more than a dozen short flights into the air, Tomas retrieved the head from the trampled, snowy, bloody ground and ordered the others back. From the hands of one of those nearby he wrenched a long, iron-headed pike he now shoved into the base of the severed neck. Tomas hoisted his grotesque battle trophy aloft.

  Those wide, anguish-filled eyes, and that gaping mouth twisted in anger … Vigil would trouble them no longer. Never again would the Mexican look down his long, patrician nose at them. At long last the prefect had gotten what he deserved for bedding down so comfortably with the conquerors. Now his mob would do to the other foreigners what they had done to Cornelio Vigil.

  Next to die—would be Sheriff Lee.

  But as Tomas wheeled about, brandishing his first victim’s head above the mob on that long pike, the rebel leader realized the porch was bare. All of Lee’s guards had poured into the street as soon as the fun began with Vigil.

  “Lee!” Tomas roared the American’s name in English.

  All around him the crowd fell to a murmur.

  “Lee!” he shrieked again, fury growing.

  Those in the mob were turning this way, then that—frantically searching for the sheriff, who should have been their next victim.

  “Find the American!” Tomas bellowed with the screech of a wounded animal. “Lee—we are coming for you!”

  31

  “There he goes!”

  When that shrill warning caught him from behind, Stephen Louis Lee quickly glanced over his shoulder, finding the dark clot of the bloodthirsty mob gazing up at him as he scrambled onto the flat roof of the shop next door to his jailhouse. The muddy, trampled, snowy ground beneath the angry Indians and Mexicans vibrated and pulsated with the flickering light of their crude torches.

  They had spotted him.

  Thank God his family was already on its way to safety with Paddock and Bass.

  But where he could go from here, Lee did not know. By now his stockings were soaked, his feet half frozen, colder than they’d ever been since that first winter he endured trapping in the mountains. Like two cakes of ice they were now as he had heaved himself onto a window ledge, teetered there to reach up and grab the hollo wed-out top of a high wall where the shop owner would plant geraniums come spring—and once he stood upon that wall, Lee hoisted himself onto the second-story roof.

  Perhaps he could dash across the crusted, icy snow to the back of the roof in time to jump off the edge, down onto a neighboring one-story building, and from there he could leap into the alleyway—find himself a horse or a mule and race out of town. Once in the desert it would be dark and he might stand a chance of them not finding him.

  The bastards! The bloody, ungrateful bastards. Red niggers, brown niggers—they were no different. Crying to get things back to the way they were when they thought their peoples were on top of the heap! Stupid pelados! They were never on top!

  Only Governor Armijo and Padre Martinez were
at the top echelon of the social pecking order … not these poor sonsabitches. They were a simple, simple lot. Easily stirred up by the likes of Martinez. Damn his Catholic balls anyway! This bloody coup had Martinez’s prints all over it!

  Lee knew nothing would ever convince him that the venal, corrupt padre hadn’t cooked up this little plot to kill all the Americans who had removed that godless Christian friar from his cozy seat of power.

  Angry shouts and bloody cries echoed from the snowy streets below him as the mob flowed around the line of shops on both ends of the square. Those poor, downtrodden bastards had no idea they were merely pawns in Martinez’s plot to put him back on the confessional throne.

  Huffing to the edge of the adobe roof, the sheriff stared down at the one-story building below him. Before he could think of why he shouldn’t jump, Lee flung himself off the edge and went sprawling on the crusty snow, sliding uncontrollably for the edge of the flat-topped building. Twisting, he flopped himself onto his belly the instant his legs went out from under him and he went down: grabbing, clawing for anything that would hold him … but he kept right on oozing for the edge.

  The fury in their voices grew in volume, echoing, reverberating, slamming off every placita wall. He heard his name again, and again. And again still. With nothing to stop his slide at the end of the roof he spilled on over, landing in the snowy alley on his hip and shoulder. Both joints cried out with cold stabs of sudden, sharp agony. Lee knew he had torn himself up something bad, if not broken something outright.

  Shakily pushing himself onto his hands he looked left, then right, unable to spot an animal. But he did see the flickering lights of their torches illuminating the walls at both ends of the alley. If he could crawl behind those crates, they might not find him and rush on by.

  Their shrill cries, and how they all took up his name like a curse, grew louder and louder still—the sound of their shrieking bouncing off the adobe walls, thundering upon him like the reverberations from a canon.

  Suddenly one of them seized his ankle, pulling him from the crates.

  Lee twisted, lunging in an attempt to hold on to the side of a huge box, hoping his fingers would find something to break with his bare hands so he had anything for a weapon. He was screaming at them in Mexican now as they dragged him out into the fluttering light of their hissing torches. Smoke steamed up from every one. Angry vapor whispered up like gauze from the face of every last one of the Indians and Mexicans as they closed around him.

  “Lee!”

  He felt the first knife go in slow. Lee winced, immediately angry at himself for showing them any pain. He would not show his murderers any of that.

  “Lee!” they cursed again.

  Suddenly his shoulder burned where before it had been nothing but bone-numbing cold. Twisting to look at the wound … he saw that his arm was gone—cleaved off clean, right at the shoulder.

  “Lee!” the shrieks came louder, right at his ear.

  His eyes climbed up to the man who had taken off the arm as the bastard held it aloft and shook it over the crowd, splattering many with warm blood, each spurt of crimson steamy on this subfreezing night.

  A leg burned.

  Gazing down he could see them hacking crudely at his left thigh—cutting him into pieces while he still lived. These goddamned Mexicans and their Pueblo henchmen—Martinez’s Catholic goons … heathens who didn’t even have the Christian decency to kill a man before they chopped him to pieces.

  Lee was gurgling, trying to catch his breath—then realized they had slashed his windpipe. It wouldn’t be long now. The burning. The cold. The pain. None of it any stronger than the anger he felt for every last one of them. But even his hate for these butchers would soon be over.

  Blood gushed from the side of his mouth as he tried to hoist his head up and look down at what was left of his body. Both arms gone and one of the legs ripped off already. And while two of them sawed away at his last leg, another had his manhood gathered in his dirty brown hand, preparing to hack off his penis and scrotum with that butcher knife. The bastard looked up and found Lee staring at him in half-lidded pain.

  Then the brown-skinned son of a bitch started drawing the knife back and forth, slowly—to make long work of it.

  “Lee!”

  Something about that voice he recognized. Despite the fog of his pain and the blindness of his hatred, the sheriff looked up, and blinked, locating the face of Tomas—the Indian who was leader of this gang of cowardly cutthroat scum.

  Then Stephen Louis Lee could not hold his head up any longer. He knew that last sudden breath he had taken was already done and no more would he ever suck another ounce of air. His head spilled back, praying his family was safe out there in the darkness with that old trapper now.

  Lee couldn’t remember his name. Funny. But it really didn’t matter because something told him that old friend of Paddock’s would get them all through on the other side of this.

  Oh, how he wanted to laugh right in the mob’s faces … as he thought on how his old friends, trappers all, would avenge his death. On how Price’s dragoons would gallop up from Santa Fe and execute the ringleaders by firing squad—Padre Martinez and all the rest. No … all the rest like this Tomas, they would hang at the end of an oiled rope.

  To see these butchers dangling there for long minutes while they slowly strangled, kicking, kicking and shit in their pants.

  I’ll see you in hell, Tomas—Lee thought, his eyes glazing in death. One day soon, you an’ me gonna settle this in hell.

  They called him Big Nigger.

  That wasn’t the name given him by the men of his Delaware tribe far away to the east. But it was what he was called by those hardened white frontiersmen whose trapping expeditions he had joined after he came here to the Southwest. They used to joke that he really wasn’t a redskinned Delaware Indian. Truth was, his flesh did have the look of glossy char, the appearance of a burnished ebony. And he was big. The Delaware trapper stood nearly a foot taller than most men of the day, his long bones riveted with bulky straps of muscle that made his stygian skin shimmer when he walked.

  Big and black, and imposingly scary too—they called him Big Nigger.

  Years ago, more than a handful now, Jim Swanock had brought Big Nigger and some other members of the Delaware tribe west, more than a handful now. Some reports stated Big Nigger had reached the mountains not long before the beaver trade died. Others claimed that no trace of him existed in the West before 1842. No matter what any of them believed—Big Nigger was one of those faceless, nameless breed who walked out of the eastern woodlands and slipped unseen into a shadowy life among the recesses of the Rocky Mountains.

  That is until old chief Jim Swanock engaged his band of twelve hunters to accompany John C. Fremont on his infamous third expedition to California in 1845. Big Nigger went along, just for the diversion of it. Then he was back in the southern Rockies by the following June of ’46, for the traders’ records show he bartered away a few furs at Hardscrabble and the Pueblo. But he didn’t follow the Arkansas on out to Bents Fort. Around the time of the expedition with Fremont, Big Nigger had come to hate the Bents and everything they stood for: money and power, white dominance over the region, and more money and power.

  Only a few of the traders up at Greenhorn or Hardscrabble, sometimes at the Pueblo, ever saw Big Nigger after Fremont’s expedition to California. Likely they were the only ones who knew that he had a woman tucked away down in the Pueblo outside Taos—a half-wild, purebred she-cat of an Indian who had just borne him a son early in the fall of ’46. Though Big Nigger came and went, disappearing for weeks at a time among the mountains, he nonetheless always returned to his wife and her people at the Pueblo—spending ever more time in those six- and seven-story mud fortresses after Kearny’s army marched through northern New Mexico, bringing American rule and driving out the former Mexican and Catholic despots.

  His wife’s people had been here so long, far longer than the Mexicans, here even befo
re the coming of the Spanish. Their adobe pueblo had been their sanctuary in this valley far back into the time the Apache conducted their annual raids from the west, when the Comanche raided twice a year from the east.

  Now the American dogs believed they could just dance right on through and upset centuries of tradition and custom, overnight. Especially when they didn’t leave but a token number of their dragoons—and those were all more than seventy miles away in Santa Fe!

  Back in the Taos Pueblo late last autumn for the birth of his son, Big Nigger listened to lots of angry talk bubbling to the surface. In and out of the old mud fortress slipped disgruntled Mexicans keen on casting out their new overseers. If there was any time to do it, a moment to wrest control back from the Americans while Kearny’s army was consumed with conquering faraway California, this was the time to strike.

  “But to assure our victory over the Americans,” Big Nigger explained to those ringleaders planning the revolt, “you must chop off the head of the beast.”

  “The head?”

  As he had gazed around the dimly lit adobe room, Big Nigger’s eyes narrowed into the slits of a copperhead. “We must kill Governor Bent.”

  “Bent is down in Santa Fe,” protested Tomas, one of those who had taken up the rebellion’s cause once their Mexican leaders had fled south months ago. “He has some soldiers around him down there, far out of reach.”

  Big Nigger had smiled cruelly, seeing this as a beautiful opportunity not only to strike a blow for his wife’s people but to rid himself of one of the great American oppressors with the same bold stroke. “He married a Mexican. A Taos family. Surely the governor comes home to visit his wife and children.”

  “Yes, he does!”

  “Then we lay our preparations, have everything ready for a time Bent returns to visit Taos,” Big Nigger coached them. “And when he does, we strike!”

  “Kill the Americans!” the room roared.

  “Kill all of them!” Big Nigger led them in the oath. “Man, woman, and child! Not one left breathing!”