Quaternity

by Kenneth Mark Hoover

  That same morning Marwood and Pat Spooner were charged to go into Piedras Negras to buy supplies for the expedition. As Marwood tied heavy packs to his horse outside a chandlery he noticed a Mandan Indian sitting cross-legged on the far side of the street.

  “He’s looking like you stole his watch,” Spooner said.

  “I never saw him before.”

  Spooner bent his lanky frame and lifted the provisions onto his horse. “Well, he’s watching you mighty hard like you done him dirt.”

  Marwood tied a sack of salt bacon to his saddle and strode across to the old man. “Why do you keep watching me?” he asked.

  The ancient did not deign to acknowledge he was being addressed. He was garbed in leather breeches, his upper torso bare. Long muscles moved under his skin. His grey hair was as knotted as sheep scut.

  “Look,” Marwood said, “I don’t want any trouble.”

  “Numank maxana,” the ancient said.

  “How’s that?”

  The man pointed north, insistent. “Numank maxana.”

  Marwood returned to Spooner holding the reins of their horses.

  “What did he say?” asked Spooner.

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t speak American. He’s crazy.” Marwood lifted himself onto his saddle and fussed with the reins in an uncharacteristic way. “I told him I didn’t want trouble. That’s all.”

  “Well, you acting like he put a bug in your ear.”

  They rode the supplies back to the bodega. That night the men stood outside and watched the heavens open up. Someone passed a bottle. Marwood watched stars rain from the empyrean black, leaving cold trails of vaporous fire.

  Bill Rota shook his head. “This is a bad sign to start off with, boys,” he said. “I knowed a three-masted ship that went down off the Japans on a night like this one.”

  “Well, we ain’t the Japans, old man,” the Cajun said. He was sweating, and his bald head glistened like a white stone. “This here’s Mexico.”

  “That doesn’t mean we won’t go under, boy, when the time comes,” Rota intoned. “You’d best remember that.”

  The Cajun squinched his pallid features into a fierce mask and spat into the river. “Hell,” he said.

  Botis watched the display from the same veranda, his thoughts unreadable. Marwood was standing directly behind the man. Botis was stripped to the waist and there was a brand across his back—a word or sigil scrawled between his shoulders with a hot running iron. Marwood could not make out the sign or read the brand mark. It was as if the hot iron had slipped, or the person branding Botis had been careless. Aside from the brand, however, there were no other marks on the man’s body.

  The men did not speak much. They went to bed early once the star shower had ended.

  The morning following they packed their gear and cleaned their guns and rifles. Powder horns and pouches were filled. The Cajun and Bill Rota ran lead balls.

  When evening drew down two women came to the bodega and cooked a large meal. The men devoured mounds of corn tortillas, charro beans, and fried beefsteaks. Following supper the women were sent away again, and the men gathered their last supplies and individual bedrolls. They saddled their horses and together crossed the river into Texas.

  They spoke little and nothing was heard other than the creak of leather and the metal clink of caparisoned horses.

  Botis pulled rein. Marwood checked his mare and the other men followed. The desert night was soft. Beside Marwood, the Cajun scanned the night sky. The stars did not threaten to fall again.

  Botis sat a blue roan seventeen hands high, with a broad chest and dark mane. The stallion’s nostrils smoked like fumaroles in the cold air, and its eyes reflected the starlight.

  “A great charge is upon us,” Botis told them. “We have but one loyalty, and that is to the gun. From this day on we sup on the devil’s leavings.”

  He turned his horse around. They rode over dark ground and met the Tonkawa spies, and the other members of the gang, in the red glimmer of dawn. The girl, Rachel, her face and hands smudged with dirt and sleep, rode behind Botis on the wooden cantle. She was a strange creature who followed them whenever they moved camp. Elfin and wild, she rarely spoke, but went from man to man as Botis beckoned around the fire. She normally did not accompany the men on any night actions, or other depredations, unless they were riding fast. Usually she waited for their return with one of the Tonkawas along some deep creek rimmed with broken salt cedar and deadfalls, or in an earthen cave.

  They rode south into Texas, staying off the main road, passing unnoticed through heavy brush and clumps of purple nopal. The morning rose over Marwood’s right shoulder, like a column of gold fire. Rising above the morning sun stood a luminous pillar of light. The men sat and watched in awe from the backs of their saddles.

  Still they did not speak. They rode toward the pillar of light like men called to an ancient destiny. As the day brightened, and the miles passed under them, the pillar disappeared, and the empty sky lay blue.

  “I told you it weren’t nothing to worry about,” the Cajun said. No one answered.

  Following Botis’s lead, they turned north.

  PART II

  Cibola

  CHAPTER 4

  They hit a string of wagon carts that had the bad fortune to pull out of a stone coulee the same moment they were passing by. They left burning wrecks, stunned men, weeping women, and bawling children. They shot all the oxen.

  Marwood watched as Botis gathered the dazed victims in a circle and addressed them from the back of his tall horse. “You know why we are here,” he said. Then he spoke to them in Spanish and pointed to a bare patch on the ground.

  Three men from the victims were chosen by Lovich and Stone at random, pulled aside, and shot in the back of the head. Their bodies pitched forward. Women threw themselves upon their dead husbands and brothers. They wept and tore their clothes and begged for mercy.

  Botis, however, was after much bigger game than wagon trains. They rode on, and two days later entered a quiet domicilio of mud homes and stone corrals ten miles south of Carrizo Springs.

  They rode through the central street, shouting and shooting and burning single-room houses, which were nothing more than hovels and jacals. People ran from the conflagration. One of the men ran in front of Marwood, aflame, beating at himself like a madman. A naked man stood in the doorway of a kiva, bleary-eyed. He had been awakened by the sudden noise and gunshots. He held an unlit tallow candle in one hand. Sporadic gunfire chunked him apart in sections. A frightened farmer ran across an empty cornfield, his round hat flying off his head. Rota spun his horse and rode him down, flung his harpoon through the farmer’s back. The barb struck bone. Rota dallied the rope around his saddle horn and the ex-whaler dragged the poor soul screaming and bouncing across the prairie, thereupon he died.

  By the end of the day fifty surviving members of the extended family of squatters had packed their things and were moving out. As Botis rode away into Zavala County, the farmers straggled in single file along the road, carrying what meagre possessions they had rescued from the fire, or had not been broken or stolen outright by the company.

  The harassment and killing did not stop there. Botis knew which estancias and rancherias to hit. They cut a bloody swath through south Texas. One morning Marwood looked back from a towering hilltop and saw rising smoke columns from three days prior.

  At first he could not figure out Botis’s plan. It was as if their captain followed some secret known only to himself.

  On Christmas Day they burned an estancia on the del Norte and stole twenty horses. They killed a beef and cooked it over hot coals, and ate and packed meat for the ride ahead.

  That night Rachel went around the camp giving the men water. She was thin and pale and already used up despite her years. She handed Marwood a wooden ladle and he drank.

  �
��You want me anytime,” she said, “you just need to ask.”

  Marwood finished his drink and handed her the ladle. “I thank you,” he said. “But I don’t expect I will need you for that.”

  “Well, you need to know how we do things here,” she said, and went off to tend the fire.

  They rode on and dipped back into Mexico through Ciudad Acuña. Riding single-file, they cut across blind, hard country. There, Apaches fell upon them, and they fought a running battle for their lives across fifty miles of brutal desert and xeric valleys.

  “I thought all these sons of bitches were dead,” Jubal Stone said. He was a small, wiry man with wide set eyes and black hair straggling over his ears. “Or on reservation in New Mexico Territory, or up down Chihuahua way, starving and grovelling for handouts.”

  “They seem sprightly enough for starving people.” The Cajun had a gash across one cheek and powder burns on his guayabera. “Belike someone pushed them off their land like we’re doing these here Mexers.”

  They fought through the ambush, and were worn out and half dead from starvation and crushing thirst by the time they reached La Linda. Their torn clothes and hard faces were blacked with gunpowder. There was only powder and ball enough for a handful of rounds among the thirteen of them.

  Botis was angry.

  “We have lost time dealing with these godless aborigines,” he said. “But I will not forget their wicked impressions upon our design.” He stalked off to find a telegraph office and relay the news of the delay to the heads of the commercial combine that he served.

  Come the New Year they crossed back into Texas and hit farms and settlements located south of Fort Davis. They remained close enough to the border not to garner too much attention from the United States Army.

  Nevertheless, some people in Texas were beginning to take notice, even if the only ones rousted from their homes and futures were poor Mexicans. One day, Botis led his party back through a domicilio they had burned out a month prior. Marwood saw whites raising raw lumber where other families had once lived. A Baptist preacher stood among them reading a passage from his Bible.

  “God must surely love Texas,” Lovich said.

  They turned up country and rode the sun down and the moon up until they reached Del Rio; they needed powder and shot, beans and bacon and salt. In the remote border town of clapboard shacks and sunbaked roads, the Cajun gutted a Cherokee mule skinner in a cantina. The Indian had stepped on the Cajun’s foot whilst coming away from the bar with a demijohn of pulque.

  The Cajun withdrew his Green River knife from the man’s thin belly. Red ropey guts spilled in a hot mass onto the sawdust floor. The Cajun was arrested by the town marshal for aggravated murder and locked away.

  That night Botis looked at the faces of his men gathered around the campfire. Grasshoppers and insects clicked and chirped in the black brush that surrounded them.

  “We have to go get him,” Botis said.

  “That marshal in Del Rio is a hard ass,” Lovich said. The flint arrowheads in his beard caught the firelight. “I heard talk about him long before he turned a key on Amos.”

  “He’s alone,” Botis said. “His deputies are riding a handful of prisoners out to the state penitentiary for hanging. We will have to go get him.”

  “Like you say, Captain.”

  The following morning Botis visited the jailhouse with a deputation of three armed men: Marwood, Jubal Stone, and another black man in their ranks named Ed Gratton. In a cultured and reasoned tone Botis informed the marshal the Cajun was doing important work for an empire of ranches who would not look kindly upon their progress being impeded by law enforcement.

  The town marshal, an illiterate Hoosier who had deserted during the war, garnered meaning enough to realize his life was in no little danger.

  Nevertheless, he was a man of the law, and he maintained he had received no word from Austin on this putative expedition, of which Botis purported to be a member. Botis assured the marshal this was so, inasmuch as he was not important enough to be made aware of decisions propertied men made, since their stations in life were much elevated above his own.

  “Furthermore,” Botis pressed on, “there is no law against killing a drunk Indian who stepped on a white man.”

  “I have a moral duty to uphold the spirit of the law, if not the actual letter,” the marshal argued. “The law,” he maintained, “has to be interpreted in various ways upon the frontier to propitiate the safety of all men, be they Indian or white.”

  Such was the marshal’s stance, and he felt he was on firm legal ground. He was willing to telegraph Austin to inquire upon the finer points of the law, if Botis so desired.

  “I do not require it,” Botis said. He pulled a loaded .32 calibre pepperbox gun from his skins and rammed the barrel against the marshal’s head. He told the lawman to name a fair price for the life of one Indian who would never amount to a white man, even if he lived a dozen lifetimes.

  Without hesitation the marshal named a price, which amounted to a simple fine of disturbing the peace. After the money changed hands—ten dollars in silver coin—and a receipt signed, the Cajun was freed. The marshal was dragged into one of the back cells, pistol-whipped, and his gun hand was broken with a framing hammer.

  They rode out of Del Rio with the Cajun seated on a fresh horse.

  That evening they camped in Seminole canyon and sat around the fires and smoked their pipes. The Tonkawas watched the horses. Rachel sat beside the main fire stitching leather with a sewing awl. Her long red hair hung over her face.

  “That marshal sure did squawk when we put the pressure on,” Gratton remarked. His stubbled beard was shot through with pepper and salt, and his hands were wide and calloused from working with horses all his life. “Yes, sir,” he said, “the world sure is made for dying.”

  Botis thought this over. Then he began to speak. It was not the first time Marwood had heard him elaborate on the way of the world, but it was the first time he started to see the world as it must be seen through another man’s eyes.

  “The unadulterated clay of man is his extremity, nay, his very love of violence,” Botis said slowly. “I tell you, Edward, agony is the art of all things human. Man is born of blood. His entrance into the world is one of agony and violence. So must be his exit, come when it may.”

  The men nodded and smoked.

  “Our marshal today learned this important lesson,” Botis said. “He is better off, for most men never learn this simple truth. Yes, Edward, man is but a creature of terrible measure borne, and born.”

  “I don’t know, Captain,” Spaw said, standing next to Marwood. “Life can’t be all killing.”

  “Why not, Lewis?”

  “Well, the Good Book says love is important, too. Like the love of a man for a woman. Or a brother for a brother. I go by that some, I guess.”

  “Ah,” Botis leaned toward the fire until his features were illuminated. “What of love? I tell you, Lewis, the only pure love is the love of violence. Any other is man’s false attempt at immortality. To embrace primitive ferocity is his single birthright. To accept the Hegelian view as the driving engine of history, that is man’s reality. It is real, Lewis, because it recognizes opposite polarities are the true reflection of human society. It is real because men see the world unencumbered, and without shadow, and operate freely therein.”

  Marwood thought about this. He had not heard words spoken like this before in his life. He didn’t know if he believed them, but they tugged at something deep within him.

  “But God loves man,” Spaw said. “All men are loved by God.”

  “Including the people we have killed?” Botis asked. “And the ones we will kill tomorrow?”

  Spaw broke a stick and threw it on the fire. “Yes,” he said with firmness. “God doesn’t make distinctions among them poor sons of bitches like we do.”

>   Botis leaned back, draped a heavy arm over one knee. “Yes, Lewis, you are correct. God does love all men. Which is why he has apportioned certain men this great work, killing upon the surface of the earth he created.”

  The men looked at one another. They looked at the captain.

  “For in the process of killing,” Botis explained, “man may, or may not, learn incisive truths about himself and the world around him. For the apostate like myself, all paths are open, like skin flayed from a slaughtered bull. All avenues are unchecked for the apostate.” His eyes found Marwood’s and moved away. “Others must find their own path, as they will.”

  “You can’t kill everything there is, Captain,” the Cajun said. He was lying on his back with his feet crossed. His eyes were dark with thought. “That ain’t nowhere possible.”

  “No, Amos,” Botis agreed. “Which is why man is all failure and will prove it out as years, and futures not yet imagined, unfold.”

  They retired to their bedrolls. One of the men called Rachel over, and she put down the awl and went to him. Come morning they packed the camp and rode for Uvalde. Marwood accompanied Botis and Lovich into town. The day was cold and the sun high. It had rained the night before; sunlight shimmered off the puddles in the middle of the street.

  They passed a sheriff’s office in plain sight and made for the telegraph agency. Botis filled out several blanks in a dead language and sent them off. They waited out most of the day for replies. When the wires came—also written in Latin—Botis read them each in turn and burned them. They rode past the sheriff’s office and out of town, and back to camp without molestation.

  Botis dismounted and addressed the Tonakawas. The Tonks immediately left to scout ahead for water while the men hid in a stand of greasewood along a dry creek bed. When the scouts returned two days later, they pressed on.

  They rode a two-week arc across empty shattered land that mirrored the bend in the del Norte, sixty miles away. They were at the southern limit of Texas Hill Country, entering the bleak desolation of South Texas. Nothing but cactus, horned toads, and mad dogs survived here. From Uvalde to St. Gall they saw neither beast nor willful man.