“I will pay.” Marwood stepped out of leather and watered his mare. A man walked out of the brakes leading a dun gelding with a charro saddle. He gripped a brass-framed Henry rifle in his other hand.
“Brookstone post you out of town?” Spaw asked.
The smashed nose and bruised face had partially healed, but Spaw’s face remained swarthed with warts and boils. Under the light of the winter stars he bore the countenance of a savage grendel-like creature. He wore a black Kossuth hat with a white ostrich feather. His clothes were white with fine road dust.
“I got pushed out,” Marwood said.
“Where you headed, Mar?”
Marwood peered down the dark trail. “Figured I’d see how the string played out on this here road.”
“I’m riding for Piedras Negras myself.”
Marwood adjusted the bridle on his mare. “I don’t know.”
Spaw paid for and watered his horse. The hermit returned to his deep, dark hole in the ground. Spaw mounted up and Marwood did the same.
“Sure glad I run into you again.”
“What are you doing out here, Spaw?”
The man glanced back at the glittering lights of Laredo on the desert floor. “I finished something that needed finishing. Now I’m able to ride on.” He smiled at Marwood. “Somebody did me a hurt once. I don’t like leaving my enemies behind.” He pulled the plaited leather reins through his hands.
Spaw pursed his lips. “You don’t have to go with me,” he said.
“I know.”
“I got someone I’m meeting in Mexico. Man with the kind of temperament to suit our blood.”
“That so.”
Spaw sat his dun horse a spell. The night air was dry and bitter cold. An owl called across the flat.
“There’s liable to be killing involved,” Spaw said.
“That’s everywhere in the world,” Marwood replied. “One more place won’t make any difference.”
They reined their horses around and rode side by side out of the draw, into the dark arms of the night.
CHAPTER 3
Riding upriver, they crossed a glistening mudflat bordered with seep willows. They rode between the boles like phantoms released upon the world. They splashed into a shallow ford, up and over a sandbar, back through deep river water.
The water sprayed from the legs and breasts of their horses like white diamonds. They spurred up a steep bank and reined in while the horses steamed and stomped and snorted in the gathering cold.
Spaw looked across the border into Texas. “Well.” He reined his horse around. Marwood followed.
That night they fixed camp. Marwood gathered firewood and cow chips harder than anthracite along the sandy bank. Spaw dug a pit and built an outlaw’s fire while Marwood lashed together a windbreak in case the weather turned. They untied their bedrolls and shared cold pinto beans and charred tortillas as a bank of clouds pushed in from the north and blanketed the stars.
Spaw shook out his makings and rolled a cigarette. While he smoked he found a square of pale leather in his possibles and rubbed it between his fingers. The campfire lighted his face as if he were staring into the kilns of Hell.
“I never saw nothing like it,” he said as he smoked the cigarette. “The way you kept coming at Brookstone that way.”
“Man should die standing if he’s going to die at all,” Marwood said. “Who is this person you’re meeting in Piedras Negras?”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” Spaw poked the fire and brought it back up.
Marwood pulled a wool blanket over his legs. He had used blades of aloe vera to medicine the welts and gunpowder burn on his forearm. The ride, and other events of the long day, had all but exhausted him.
“We got a private contract to blow Mexican farmers and squatters off so the big ranches can take their land.” Spaw stopped. He flicked the ash from his cigarette into the fire and continued. “The man I work for is Captain Abram Botis.”
“Botis,” Marwood said. Then, softer, “Botis.”
“You know the name?”
“I heard it somewhere before.” It wasn’t as much the man’s name as it was something old, and yet familiar to him.
Spaw caressed the leather square with the pad of his thumb. “Botis was a Franciscan monk or friar or whatever them Papists have. He got into trouble in the Old Country and was excommunicated for an apostate. All I know is he ain’t for religion anymore, but he damn sure don’t mind killing. He has taken to that with single-minded purpose.”
“What else can you tell me about this job?” Marwood asked.
Spaw crushed out his cigarette. “The big Texas ranches along the border have piled into what you might call a combine. They don’t want to wait for the scales of justice to tilt their way. Empires don’t have much patience, I guess.”
“You say this work is back in Texas?”
Spaw made a sweeping motion with his free hand. “Up and down the border. New Mexican Territory. Wherever we ride and break ground. It’s an open contract. I was on my way there when I got sidelined in Laredo. There’re a lot of people to run off, and it won’t be accomplished in a single season. Pay looks to be right promising.”
“What’s the wages?”
“Take and carry, plus a share of the original contract.”
Marwood watched the campfire dance. “A big enterprise of ranches, and what they have to protect, is not going to let us ride clear when the work is finished.” He looked up at Spaw. “Does this Captain Botis know that?”
Spaw grinned broadly. “I think the captain knows it better than they do.”
The following morning they saddled the horses and led them to the river. The dawn was cold and grey. A thin frost covered the ground; there were sheets of skim ice in the shallows under which small fish moved.
Marwood filled his canteen in the murky water while the horses drank and spluttered. Spaw splashed his monstrous face and scratched the back of his neck. He squatted on the bank, arms lank, black Kossuth hat between his hands as if he were begging for alms on a street corner. He peered across the wild expanse like a primeval god. He stood, clapped the hat on his head, and mounted up.
“Let’s go,” he said.
They kept to the Mexican side of the border, riding through candelilla shrub and avoiding an ox-drawn carreta led by a man and a boy with one eye and a withered arm. There was no other road traffic. Later in the day they stopped at a stone water tank outside a wooden tienda and ate huevos rancheros and refried beans, and drank cups of mescal. They rose from the table and purchased five pounds of cured side meat, a bag of Spanish grind, and grain for the horses. It was enough food to see them through the next four days.
As Marwood fed his mare a handful of oats he looked at Spaw’s horse, with its charro saddle and plaited leather reins fashioned from human skin. He had seen the smooth pliable leather after Sand Creek, and recognized it again now. He remembered Spaw rubbing the cured bit of leather with its champered edges between his fingers, and again on today’s longish ride to water. It was as if the tactile property of man leather quieted something deep and turbulent inside his soul.
Marwood knew what that was like, having a dry and silent power inside waiting to give terrible voice. He found himself wondering which way Spaw would have jumped at Sand Creek.
They rode off and made another early camp. It rained that night, thin and freezing. The next day dawned clear, with a south wind bending the tops of trees. As Spaw broke camp Marwood recharged his gun with powder, ball, and percussion cap.
Spaw watched him clean the revolver. “You change them loads ever’ morning?”
Marwood closed the cylinder and put the gun back in its holster. “Got some rain last night. I don’t want a misfire.”
“Five new loads everyday,” Spaw said, contemplating the logistics. “That ge
ts downright expensive.”
“So is dying.”
Spaw swung into his saddle and repeatedly pulled the reins through his hands. The man was always fiddling. “Yes, sir,” he laughed. “Captain Botis will like you just fine.”
They hit Piedras Negras four days later and drank raw pulque in an empty taqueria with a low ceiling and a smoking coal oil lamp that stung their eyes. The day burned itself out with a final blaze. They took supper in a restaurant off the main plaza. After filling up on tortillas fried on a clay comal, and strips of goat meat smothered in chili peppers and onions, they walked up a deserted street through one of the mud barrials. They reached a dilapidated bodega overlooking the slow brown river.
There were horses tied to the outside rail. A light shone through loose door slats, cast corrugated stripes on the uneven ground at their feet.
Spaw hammered the door with a gloved fist. Someone on the other side unlocked it and Spaw pushed through the low doorway. Marwood followed.
Men were crowded around a central table playing cards. Some had half-dressed girls on their laps, or standing at their shoulders to refill an empty glass or light a cigar.
Spaw grabbed the arm of one of the women and pulled her out of the way. He walked to the edge of the main gaming table. “Hey, Dan,” he said, “where is the captain at?”
A wide-faced Dutchman with gapped front teeth looked briefly at Spaw then back to his cards. “Where you think?”
Spaw found a glass of whiskey and drank it down. “Bring me a bottle from somewheres, Lovich,” he told the man. “We come off the trail.”
Dan Lovich possessed long blond hair braided with flint arrowheads and silver beads. His eyes were the colour of dark molasses. His barbarous beard ruffed over his collar. His clothes were filthy and he wore more animal skins than anything store bought.
“Does it look like we done come down from church?” he growled. He discarded two cards into the deadwood pile and drew like. “Get one of these here doxies to comb your cock for you. I ain’t your goddamn mother.”
Spaw faced Marwood. “We won’t see the captain tonight. I’ll show where you can stable your horse and bunk down.”
Someone called across the room. “Spaw, that the new man?”
The man who spoke was bald. His sharp features were squinched together in the middle of pallid flesh and heavy jowls.
“That’s up for the captain to decide,” Spaw told him. He explained to Marwood, “That’s Amos Choteau, the Cajun. Crazier than a shithouse rat. But I ain’t never seen no man better to break horses. The greybeard sharpening his harpoon is Old Bill Rota. He used to sail them Boston whalers out of Nantucket. He’s older’n any of us by a few years, but he’ll come off the wall and back your play. That tall nigger eating piñole is Pat Spooner. Got him a family in Bexar. You’ll meet the others come later. Jubal Stone ain’t here tonight. He’s watching our break camp across the river. Got us a camp slut, too, name of Rachel. She’s always ripe and ready. Also got two Tonkawa scouts working for us, but we don’t never let them sleep with us in town.”
“Where do they sleep?”
Spaw shrugged. “Wherever Indians sleep. We will all meet together once we cross into Texas. There’s near a dozen of us all told.”
“When do we ride?”
“When the captain decides, Mar, and not before. I’ve seen the time he took a fortnight before he made a move. You play chess?”
“No.”
“Captain does.”
They stabled their horses and returned to the main house. Around midnight Marwood rolled the straw mattress down on his cot and crawled onto it. Another man or three drifted to bed an hour later while the rest stayed up drinking whiskey and hazing the whores.
Come morning, after a plate of sofkee and spicy chorizo, he was brought before Botis. Spaw had met with the captain for ten minutes before calling Marwood inside.
It was a storeroom off the cocina where an arthritic beldam dipped clay breakfast bowls in dishwater and wiped them with her dirty apron. The room was arranged in an impromptu office with a nail barrel for a desk, bags of feed corn in one corner, and an open window in the eastern wall.
Marwood could see the brown glint of river water through the reeds and rushes. Down in Piedras Negras proper a donkey brayed, welcoming the dawn.
Dan Lovich was standing in the room with a cut down double-barrelled shotgun cradled in his arms. Marwood got the impression Lovich was the unacknowledged lieutenant of this outfit. In as much as military rank or class had any bearing among these rough and wild men.
It was the first time in a long time he felt at home.
Marwood stood before the nail barrel. Abram Botis was a long, slab-sided man with a black, broad-brimmed galero atop his round head. His sun-browned face was heavily bearded, the hair on his forearms thick and matted. He was dressed in black and brown. His muddy leather boots stopped below his knees with drooping mule tugs on either side.
Botis plucked a pair of tortoise-shell glasses with ivory plaquettes from his pocket. He perched them on the end of his nose and inspected Marwood. The other men in the tiny room remained in one place and did not speak.
“Lewis informs me you are a man who can ride the river,” Botis said. His deep voice emanated from some black crack in the centre of his chest and boomed from his throat. “Well, that’s what I want to know. Can you?”
Marwood shrugged. “I wasn’t born on my knees. I don’t figure going out that way.”
“Would you ride with a man who would?”
“No,” Marwood answered, “I would not.”
Botis watched him close. “Neither would I.” He leaned forward in his chair and tapped the top of the nail barrel with his forefinger. “Nor would any man in my employ. Do you have a horse?”
“I have a good mare, but she can’t go all day.”
“We will get more horses,” Botis assured him. “You can add your mare to the remuda and cut out any horse you want, except Acheron. That stallion is mine. He won’t let another man ride him, anyway. I take it you have your own saddle?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s something.” Botis nodded at his gun. “I see you carry a Colt Dragoon. That’s heavy iron for six shots.”
“Five.”
“Indeed?” This answer pleased Botis. “You are a careful man. I take it you know how to use that gun to its fullest capacity?”
“I do.”
“Ever kill a man outright?”
“Yes.”
“In cold blood?”
“I have done.”
“He did for two Pinkerton detectives in Laredo,” Spaw put in. “The whole town was buzzing about it when I got out of the jug.”
“May I examine your gun?” Botis held his hand out without waiting for an answer.
Marwood put the hammer on half cock and handed it over, butt first.
Botis turned the Colt in his hands, running a broken thumbnail over the square-backed trigger guard. He stopped and stared at the yellow bone handle. He went on to check the loads, springs, and action of the gun, his long fingers moving with delicate expertise. Then he re-examined the bone handle in some detail.
He handed the gun back to Marwood. “You carve that handle yourself?”
Marwood holstered the weapon. “Yes.”
No one spoke. Spaw looked at his boots and rocked slightly on his heels.
“You know what we are about here?” Botis asked Marwood.
“Spaw said something about blowing poor Mexican farmers off their land.”
“You say that like you don’t believe we can do it.”
“I say that like I expect lawyers and judges will have something to say about it.”
“Maybe,” Botis conceded. “But in this country, as in all countries, land belongs to the man strong enough to take it, and hold i
t. We are operating at the behest of an important combine, which has hired us to act as lawful agents on their behalf.” Botis looked out the window. “Land came at a premium along the border after the war. These big spreads will not wait for some mealy-mouthed judge to decide what plat belongs to them, and what does not.”
He turned his attention back to Marwood. “These Texas ranchers have a Calvinistic hatred of Mexicans, Indians, and anyone else who steps in their way. It is always thus with the world. Those with power and money shape history, and the chaff and duff are blown aside. Do you understand these principles?”
“I believe so.”
“There will be killing. There will be a lot of killing if it comes to it. And it’s going to come to it.”
“I don’t have a problem with that.”
“I ask nothing but a man keep his gun clean and follow my orders. First sign of treachery I will put a ball in the back of your head and ride on. Payment will be on a percentage basis of the total contract, plus whatever you pick up along the way. Does this arrangement suit you?”
“I’ve worked for found before. What’s the contract worth?”
“One hundred thousand dollars. These people have it to burn.”
“I guess that’s all right.”
Botis spoke quickly, perhaps to challenge Marwood, or expose him. “You’re not a man who cares about gold, are you?” he asked.
“I don’t care about it at all.”
“I prefer to be called ‘Captain’ among the men in my company.”
“All right.”
“Neither do I,” Botis admitted after brief reflection. “Gold that is. I am after something bigger. But I guess you may have cottoned to the fact an outfit like ours would not be interested in shaking down Mexican farmers for shits and giggles.” He gave a minute nod to Lovich. “I am satisfied with this man. Hire him on with full pay.”
“I guess he will stick,” Lovich said, eyeing Marwood.
Botis stared at Marwood again. “He’ll stick for himself. Whether he will stick for us is another matter altogether. But that is any man, and I cannot fault him for that.”
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