by Kage Baker
“Hey! Amigo!” he called out in crude Texan Spanish. Tomas turned. He’d been target shooting. “Yeah, you. I think I finally got a line on that no-good murdering hombre that killed your pa. Looks like he’s holed up not five miles from here. You want to go see if you can get him?”
I looked up from the cookfire to watch the boy’s reaction. He stood frozen, staring with those enormous dark eyes. Slowly and deliberately he holstered the pistol. “Will you have the kindness to loan me a horse, señor?”
“Get him a horse, Juanito,” Einar said.
Juan Bautista gulped. “You don’t want to do this,” he told Tomas. “Think how bad you’ll feel afterward.”
“No. If I get it over with, I can be my own man,” said Tomas.
So Juan Bautista brought out a horse, saddled and bridled, and Tomas climbed awkwardly into the saddle. He looked sick and dizzy up there.
Einar reached over and took his pistol out of its holster. He spun the empty chambers. “Won’t do you any good unless you reload, son. Here, take mine.” He handed off the gun full of blanks, and I looked meaningfully at Juan Bautista. First bit of stage business in our play accomplished.
Tomas stuck the gun in his belt and drew a deep breath. “Let’s go, señor. Take me to that murdering son of a whore.”
They rode away down the canyon, dust clouds spiraling up. Juan Bautista stood looking after them, wringing his hands. “I have to see,” he said, and ran for the stable, from which he emerged a moment later leading another horse.
I ran to him as he got into the saddle. “Take me along. This ought to be some show.”
He put out a hand, and I leaped up behind him, just as Imarte came running out of the inn. “What is it? Is it time? Don’t tell me they’ve left—”
“We’ll let you know how it went,” I said, and we galloped away.
We followed the dust clouds north through the pass, up the grade to Dark Canyon, and over the flank of Cahuenga Peak. We were coming to the high ground behind Mount Hollywood, which sloped gently down toward the river, and I wondered if Einar had chosen the spot deliberately. You could call it an appropriate location for a shootout; this was the site of an immense graveyard in the distant future. Nearer our time, Griffith would shoot the battle sequence from Birth of a Nation here, and for all I knew the battle scene that ended Intolerance too. Einar had told us about it enough times, in his babbling enthusiasm. Now, before it became that famous place, it would serve as a small and private theater for a grim farce.
But where were the actors?
We saw the two horses tethered in a stand of oak trees. And, just creeping over a ridge and peering into the hollow beyond, there were Einar and Tomas. Juan Bautista urged our mount forward.
Porfirio was advertising his presence. A plume of smoke rose thinly. He’d made a cookfire.
“Up there,” I said, pointing to our right. We could climb a winding trail for a better view. Juan Bautista hesitated, then swung the horse’s head uphill, and we ascended hurriedly, peering through the oak trees.
Porfirio was sitting by his fire, warming his hands. He looked tired. He glanced up as Einar broadcast, We’re here, man. Is it a good day to die?
Always. Porfirio looked down at the embers again, deliberately ignoring the mortal boy’s clumsy approach through the weeds. Oh, God, the kid slipped, was tumbling down to land in a crouch not ten yards from where Porfirio sat. Did he really want to do this? Up on the ridge, Einar pulled out the little electronic control and waited.
Porfirio raised his face. Tomas made a stifled sound and staggered backward. We couldn’t see his face, but we had a fine view of Porfirio as he got to his feet and held out his hands, his empty hands.
“Very good, mi hijo. It’s my turn. Blood for blood, so you can be a man.”
Then the boy was firing wildly, bang bang bang, and the charges detonated in perfect time with his shots. The blood bags exploded outward, and Porfirio spun and fell. The noise of the shots echoed; it hit the face of the ridge like a wave breaking and rolled back down the slope, prolonging the moment, washing us in the sound. Out on the valley floor beyond the river, a dog began to bark.
It’s a wrap. Beautiful, Einar transmitted. You all right? He came jumping down the slope, stuffing the detonator remote into the pocket of his jeans.
Damn things hurt came the answering transmission. I confess I was relieved to hear Porfirio reply; that had been a truly convincing death scene. Look at him now, the way he lay there ashen and motionless, his lean villainous face frozen in a snarl like a dead animal’s. But then, who could counterfeit death better than an Immortal? We see so much of the real thing.
Tomas had dropped the gun and was doubled up, retching. Einar caught him and steadied him. “Come on, boy. We have to get out of here. No sense getting yourself hanged. Let’s go, let’s go.” He practically carried him up the slope and down the other side, to the place where their mounts were waiting. Juan Bautista spurred our horse through the sagebrush toward them.
“Did you get him?” I asked, playing my part.
“Got him, all right,” Einar said, boosting Tomas into the saddle. “Now this boy’s satisfied his debt of honor and he can go home to his ma with a clear conscience. Isn’t that right, son?”
Juan Bautista rode up to Tomas and peered into his face worriedly. Tomas looked deathly ill again, as bad as on the night he’d been shot.
Then we all thundered away through the November evening, and the sun was setting red as blood, and the shadows were long. Tomas wept the whole way, and when we walked our horses into the innyard, he tumbled off his horse and into Imarte’s waiting arms.
She folded him into her bosom.
“You poor brave boy. You come with me, tell Marta all about it,” she cooed. I trust everything went off as planned?
You shoulda seen, Einar transmitted.
If anyone had bothered to tell me in time, I might have, she replied, giving me a nasty look. She turned and pulled Tomas away with her into the inn, doubtless to obtain a first-person narrative from him and gain valuable insights into the culture of machismo. The damned harpy.
She nursed him through the hysterics, and I think she rewarded him the way a man wants to be rewarded, and as the evening wore on it, she gave him aguardiente too to bolster his sense of worth. He cheered up tremendously and began to swagger and sing, as I’d never heard him do before. We all assumed it was the relief of being out from under this burden he’d carried his whole young life. But Juan Bautista listened for a while and then vanished silently up the canyon, taking Marie and Erich with him. I busied myself with making some plain beef stew—I’d had all the Chaldean Surprise I could stand—and Einar bounced around taking care of his innkeeper duties, still pleased with himself at the way his special effects had turned out. Even he began to look a little concerned, though, as the noise level in Imarte’s room rose.
I was trying not to listen to what seemed to be an argument developing, when I picked up Porfirio on the ridge behind us, just arriving.
Mendoza?
Yes.
I could use some hot food.
Hang on.
I ran and got a blanket from my room, and half a case bottle of aguardiente, wrapping them together. I got a bowl of stew and a spoon and hurried up the canyon. As I ran, I could hear Tomas emerging from the inn, shouting to Imarte to leave him the hell alone.
“Whoa, son, where are you going?” Einar said, getting up.
“Set up the bottles!” the boy shouted. “Set up the bottles and give me that gun!”
Target shooting again? I shrugged and kept climbing.
Porfirio was sitting quietly in the darkness, gray as a ghost, which he looked like in his serape with the holes and bloodstains all over it. I put the bowl of stew into his hands and threw the blanket around his shoulders.
“Thanks.” He turned the bowl in his hands, savoring the warmth. I sat down beside him and uncorked the aguardiente bottle.
“How is he?
”
“I think he’s having some kind of hysterical reaction,” I answered delicately. “But I guess that’s normal if you think you’ve just killed somebody. It looked great, by the way.”
“The kid’s drunk,” Porfirio said with a scowl, gazing at the circle of light around our cookfire. “Listen to him.”
Gunfire, followed by Tomas’s shrill laughter. He was telling Einar to bring more bottles to shoot at. I had a gulp of aguardiente myself. Porfirio spooned stew into his mouth, but he never took his eyes from the fire. They were dark and cold.
“Listen to him, down there,” he said. “He thinks he’s some killer, he thinks he’s one hell of a man.”
“You did your best,” I said. “What else could you do, Porfirio? At least this way he can go home and make his mother happy.”
“She’ll never be happy,” he said, emptying the bottle and throwing it away. “My fault, I guess.”
More shots. We could hear Einar making a very tactful suggestion and being refused indignantly. Porfirio exhaled hard.
“I was so relieved when she married Jaime. At last, I thought, somebody who’ll take care of her, and he’s even got money. But see how that turned out. I could go looking for Juan and Agustin, I guess, when this job is over; I could try to track them down and see if they’ve married, if they’ve kept the family going. But what am I going to do about her? And what am I going to do about that kid?
“Look at him down there, strutting around with his gun. He’s bought into the whole damned lie about blood and honor and revenge. He was made to feel like a little nobody all his life, but now it’s payback time. Nobody’s ever going to tell him what to do again, not now that he’s killed somebody. Ay, ay, ay.”
Porfirio buried his head in his arms. “Who will take this curse off my family?” he asked the night.
The party didn’t last much longer. Tomas got cold and ran out of things to shoot at, and Einar got tired of dodging bullets and vanished into the bushes, so Imarte came out and tried to get the boy to come to bed before he caught pneumonia or fell into the fire. He tried to hit her. You don’t do that to an Immortal. She swiftly knocked him out and carried him indoors like a sack of flour.
Some time in the afternoon next day, Einar roused him and got him into a change of clothes. When the 1600-hours stage came rolling up, Tomas was bundled into a seat, still groggy, and Einar loaded on his trunk and paid for his passage southbound.
Porfirio came out of the hills, and our lives resumed their courses. I don’t suppose I’ll ever see that young man again; but I can imagine how he’ll turn out.
Can’t you, señors?
WELL, IT JUST GOT DARKER and crazier in bad old Los Diablos. Bad things come in by the armful and leave by inches, it’s said. Winter came, but no rain; smallpox instead. It began in the old shacks on the hill where the poorer citizens lived, Sonoratown, the locals called it. The few remaining Indians were dying like flies, and then the Mexicans were being wiped out, and pretty soon there were even rows of coffins being carried to the Protestant cemetery. Stagecoach service became irregular, to say the least, in the dry and bitter cold.
Dry. There wasn’t a creek or a freshet running. Our little stream became pools of standing water, shrinking perceptibly day by day. I don’t know where the trout went. Our well hadn’t given out, but we were taking serious measures to conserve water. Whatever water we used to wash I took to carrying out to the oak trees, to pour over their roots. Within hours after emptying a pail, you could see tiny blades of grass emerging where the water had been splashed. The land was desperate to cover itself with green; but the rain never fell, and next morning there would be deer slot everywhere, and the grass would all be gone.
There was water in the sky, all right; there was water vapor holding the haze together, which stung the eyes at midday and kept the adobe rooms cold as death. There was water in the slate clouds that rolled over us and kept going without releasing so much as a drop. The longhorns began to rove into people’s vegetable patches, and the last of the old rancheros looked at the brown hills and wondered if they oughtn’t borrow some more from the Yankee moneylenders to tide them over what might be an unprofitable year.
We froze, but we got no rain. San Francisco got rain; but, then, San Francisco never doesn’t get rain. It rained back east in Vicksburg, where another battle was fought, and we read rumors of soldiers drowning in their tents. It rained in Mexico, where Juarez sat in his room and calmly considered what he ought to do about Europe. Everybody else got rain, but we were dying of thirst.
And smallpox.
Oscar stayed home a lot, driving the rest of us crazy; but how was he going to sell anything with people hiding behind their doors, more afraid of the disease than they’d ever been of stray bullets? We saw almost nothing of Imarte, though, so it was a fair trade. She was having a field day, moving among the dying like a scarlet angel, easing their journey out of the world in exchange for life stories gasped out to the sympathetic stranger. To be fair, I believe she nursed a few back to health. When she wasn’t busy compiling statistics on mortality, she found time to get some suspiciously British mining engineer to buy her a Peach and Honey at the bar of the Bella Union, and one or two spilled a few more details to support her pet conspiracy theory. The whole thing was so ludicrous, we actually encouraged her to talk about it, on the few occasions she came home; we needed the laughs.
And who wanted to celebrate Christmas, on the underside of hell? Time was when I enjoyed walking to a town and slipping into a pew to watch a pastorela, with the earnest mission Indians trying so hard to get to Bethlehem and all the teenaged boys in the parish portraying the devils who tried so hard to prevent them (a role so natural for any teenaged boy). I loved the way the spoken verses would echo in the old church, and the way the flames of the candles winked in their glass cups, and the way the sleepy mortals observed a reverent hush all around me. It was all so charming. And when the Indian pastores finally made it to the stable, after vanquishing Señor Satan (who always bore a close resemblance to a gentleman of Old Spain), and the central Mystery unfolded, how lovely to see the black-eyed Mother with her Indian cheekbones and serene smile as she displayed the tiny red Child with his shock of black hair. One could almost come to love mortals again.
Or not. Other years, I’d been alone in the night, where the great trees towered black against the stars, so many white stars, and the air was cold and full of the smell of evergreens. I’d been in the heart of the Mystery then, too. The stars rang like little bells at midnight, and one moment the air would be dead calm on the forest floor, and then a wind would spring up, just on that stroke of midnight, a wind magically warm and full of perfume, and you knew that the Light had begun to fight his way out of his grave, and winter would not last forever.
But this winter of 1862, that promise seemed to have failed. So many coffins, and not a drop of rain.
I DON’T SUPPOSE I NEED to tell you that the hauntings became worse, señors. Became strange. He still pursued me in the night, my dead love, but he seemed to have changed; we seemed to have lost England and gone to places I’d never been. I’ll tell you the dream that’s clearest in my mind.
I was in a jungle like a Rousseau painting, you know, all those botanical specimens so carefully delineated and dead-eyed jaguars staring forth here and there like so many stuffed toys. Something was coming after me, crashing through the fever-green forest, and where he passed, the palms and ferns and bromeliads all shook to life, lost their neat arrangements, and became real, pulsing and shooting toward the sun.
I’m not sure I was making any effort to run from him.
Then he was coming across a clearing at me, and I could see him at last, the savage, was that a Mayan with his high cheekbones and long curved nose? No, how could I have thought so? This was another kind of naked savage. He was tattooed fearsomely, swirling blue spirals all over his white body, his pale-blue eyes glittering with deadly laughter, and he was on me with the grace an
d weight of a lion. I went over like a rag doll. What was my stern Protestant metamorphosing into? What atavistic madness was this? He had a flint knife, and it was a beautiful thing, beautifully worked, and as he searched for my heart, I saw the fan palms waving above our twined bodies. I tried to tell him that the fan palm is the only member of the Arecaceae actually native to California, but I was distracted by the discovery that he had the front page of the London Times for January 6, 1863, tattooed on his chest.
I tried to read it as he was busily taking out my heart. Then we heard shots behind him, and he turned with a snarl. Looming above us was a vast blue pyramid, and from its base hunters were coming, sending lead singing through the air. He turned and looked back down at me, and I saw that his face was painted too, a pattern of red and white diagonals crossing on a blue Held. No time, no time to do this properly! said somebody, and he rose above me and lifted the blade in both hands for the stroke of mercy.
But I was awake and moaning on my cot before he was able to give it, and blue light was crawling away, diminishing into darkness, leaving me miserably, eternally alive.
THE DAY THE ACTORS CAME, we were taken by surprise. We’d been alone in our canyon for so many days, it was hard to imagine a stagecoach ever stopping here again. But—
“Incoming,” announced Einar, and with sour laughter we hurried down the canyon to see who was arriving, departing, or just passing through. We heard the shouting as the stage pulled up.
“Are you mad, man? Are you demented, have you quite taken leave of your senses?” said a stentorian baritone. “Press on! Press on, though wolves howl and birds of prey darken the air. D’you want to die of the peste, for God’s sake?”