During a four-day waterless ride, twenty-eight miles out of St. Gall, one of the company of fifteen winters, Calvin Zapata, had his horse spooked by falling rock. Marwood’s mare reared up and flicked her tail. Jubal Stone’s horse took this as a sign she wanted to be mounted and tried to do so with Marwood in saddle.
Marwood kicked the other horse while he got his own animal under control. He put all his weight into the right stirrup to keep the saddle from rolling out under him.
“Keep your damn horse away from mine,” he barked. Stone hauled on his reins, trying to back his horse away. He pulled so hard the leather parted from the cheek of the snaffle bit. His horse tossed its head when the bit left its mouth with a pop.
Meanwhile, Zapata was having his own brand of trouble. His three-point bay reared, broke a cannon bone on the loose talus and scree, and collapsed, shrieking. Zapata was slammed against the hard wall of the narrow arroyo they had been moving through. He fell from the saddle, half-dazed, bleeding copious amounts from his mouth.
“Oh, my god,” Rachel said. “He’s been killed dead.”
“Belike he got something bad broke inside,” the Cajun said, watching Zapata spew blood on his leather chaps and boots. The boy could not catch his breath. The Cajun rose in his saddle and looked down quarter. “Hey, Tunk, we got a man down here.”
“Goddamn, you keep that gringo cabrón away from me,” Zapata cried. He continued to spit blood, doubled over in pain. “Oh, my, I think I’m done for.”
Tunk Quillen, an ex-surgeon drummed out of the Confederate Army for practising resurrection and other nameless arts on patients who had not slipped into God’s Glory, rode up and dismounted. He was Botis’s trail doctor, of arcane sorts; he sewed gaping wounds with boiled horsehair and bled a man for God’s measure.
Zapata watched with fearful eyes as the scarecrow figure approached with an air of martyred patience. Quillen carried a black medical bag in his left hand.
“Oh, Dios,” the boy said, tears welling. He could not take his eyes off the bag. No man in the company knew what horrors were contained therein, and few dared to guess.
Quillen grabbed a handful of the boy’s sweaty lank hair and pulled his head back.
“Open yer mout’,” the ex-Confederate ordered. “Open it, damn you to all hell.”
The boy did so; he was afraid of what the ex-surgeon might do if he did not follow these instructions. The surgeon pressed his fingers on either side of the boy’s bony jaw, activating nerve points so the mouth remained open. He poked around with a stick. Zapata’s eyes rolled helplessly. Silent tears streaked his face. Quillen released the patient and wiped his hands on his pants.
“Bit your tongue in two,” he pronounced. “You won’t be licking cunt for a month.” And with that diagnosis he proceeded back to his horse, and whatever demons he wrestled in his mind.
“Oh, Dios,” Zapata burbled. “Now I got to shoot my own horse.”
“Such is our great work upon the surface of the earth,” Bill Rota intoned.
The men looked up column to make sure Botis was out of earshot, then reeled to and fro in their saddles like drunken hoot owls.
CHAPTER 5
They rode the day out and halted when they spied a file of cavalry picking its way across the hazy landscape—a thin line of black riders escaping into a westering sun.
“Negro Cavalry,” said Rota, who, despite his advanced age, had the best eyes among them. “I expect they’re out of Fort Stockton. We’re close enough.”
“You figure them to be after us?” Lovich asked.
“Best hope not,” Doc Quillen said, coming up. “I’ve been to Stockton and those soldiers play for keeps.”
“What about it, Bill?” Lovich asked. “Are they after us?”
Rota leaned off his saddle and spat. He wiped his mouth with a gloved hand. “Can’t rightly say without going up and asking one of them.”
Botis watched the silhouetted figures disappear into the long evening light. “I would not think they are searching for us,” he said. “It is too soon to be onto us, and they are headed the wrong direction. Daniel?”
“If they are headed west,” Lovich said, “they are headed into Comancheria. Punitive expedition. Assuming any of those mothers’ sons make it out of there alive. Which they won’t.”
“We will keep to their southern quarter,” Botis suggested. “I prefer not to fight my way to the Mexican border if it comes to that. I want a clear line of escape. If we must, we will muffle the hooves of our horses when we cut their trail later tonight. Mount up.”
They nooned and watered the next day at Comanche Springs. “Patrick,” Botis said, dismounting, “you and Mar ride to St. Gall and fetch new supplies.” He turned to attend another matter in camp. Rachel had found an old hackberry stump for firewood and she needed help dragging it to the fire.
Pat Spooner grumbled at this delegation of work. “Captain,” he groused, “why I always got to ride for victuals?” He picked up his saddle and bedroll, threw them down in frustration. “I ain’t no new man. Why not send Charley Broadwell or Sam Decker out with Mar? They’re both of them newer ’n me.”
Dan Lovich led a yellow gelding past the central campfire Spaw was building.
“Spooner,” Lovich threw over his shoulder, “Lincoln may have freed the slaves, but your soul belongs to Captain Botis. You do like he says.”
Marwood and Spooner readied their horses. “Take the long way around,” Jubal Stone came up and told them. His long greasy hair curled over his ears. “We don’t want them Buffalo Soldiers backbearing up our asses.”
“I guess I know how to ride for bacon, Jubal,” Spooner shot back.
“Well see you don’t lead them Negro soldiers back here, that’s all I am saying.”
They rode off and camped the night in a low spread of mesquite brush and sacahuista. The moon was a cotton ball in the sky. Spooner appeared in better humour now that he was away from the main company.
Spooner carried a lightweight Colt .44 revolving rifle as his main weapon. He cleaned the rifle bore with an oily rag. “There’s a burr under the captain’s saddle,” he murmured. He wiped the bore down one last time and loaded the weapon. “Ever since I knowed him.”
Marwood fed small branches into the fire lengthwise, Indian fashion. They caught and burned. “What burr? Is he looking for something?”
Spooner charged the chambers with ball and powder, placed percussion caps over the vent nipples at the rear of the cylinder. He propped the rifle beside him and looked at Marwood in all earnestness, eyebrows cocked.
“Man, don’t you know who you’re riding with?” he asked. “The captain, he don’t like being proved wrong ’bout nothing. Especially somebody just joined the outfit.”
“I am not out to prove anyone wrong,” Marwood said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Spooner kicked one leg out. He settled down and watched the fire. “Captain says he can remember every day of his life, and I believe it.” Spooner looked up. “One night we threw date and time at Botis and damn if he didn’t have all the facts at his fingertips. Naturally, we couldn’t prove he was in Germany or France on such and such a date, or what the weather was like in Belgium in March of ’52. But, I don’t think no man could make it up so quick on the fly. What convinced me was when I gave the date I married my old gal, Sarah Anne. That was in San Antone, years ago. Damn if Botis didn’t have the weather down to the temperature, plus the fact a freight-wagon had overturned in the alameda and crushed a little girl’s legs. A doctor had to amputate on the spot. The captain was there at the time, you see, and he remembered everything that happened about the day.”
Neither of them spoke. The fire snapped.
“I don’t know where he gets that power,” Spooner said. “If it was something he found or was born with. But I can’t deny he has it.”
Marwood said nothing.
Spooner coughed into his hand. He looked at the yellow sputum and flung it into the brush then wiped his thin hand on his shirt. “But you asked about something else and I’m going to tell you. If you ride with us you best know. The captain says he saw something somewheres up in high prairie country. He rode toward it, but it disappeared. Every time he sees it and rides for it, it disappears on him. He knows it’s there, and one day he will find it.” Spooner noticed Marwood’s growing doubt. “That’s what the captain says.”
“You mean like that sun pillar we saw the first day?” Marwood asked. “I’ve seen those before, too.”
“No,” Spooner said. “This is something else.”
“What did he see?”
“Why don’t you ask Spaw,” Spooner hedged. “Or Old Doc Quillen, maybe. He’s been with the captain longest. They both of them know more than I do.”
A coyote called in the dark. The moon did not answer back.
“You believe this vision story, whatever it is?” Marwood asked.
“It don’t matter a damn what I believe,” Spooner said, listening to the coyote with his head cocked. “All that matters is what the captain, him, believes.”
Marwood draped bacon over palo verde poles to crisp. When Spooner spoke again his voice was soft and pliant, as if he were kneeling in a confessional, professing past sins.
“You ever seen the captain’s horse?” he asked Marwood.
“Yes,” Marwood said. “Damn thing’s a monster.”
Spooner shook his head with a faint grin. “You take a closer look at that horse one day, Mar. You’ll see what I mean.”
“I told you I’ve seen his horse.”
Spooner kicked his other leg out until his boots were side by side. He tapped the toes together. “Not up close you ain’t, or you wouldn’t say that you had.”
“That logic doesn’t scour, Spooner. Is every man in this outfit crazy?”
Spooner laced his hands across his belt, lifted his thumbs. “You free and white. You ain’t got to do nothing I say.”
The coyote called again. Another answered with short excited yips, farther away. The men listened to the desert speak around them. They ate in silence.
“What’s the matter with you, Spooner? You’ve been chewing on gristle ever since we left Piedras Negras.”
“It don’t concern you none, mister.”
“That is where I am inclined to disagree.” Marwood finished eating and wiped his hands. “If I can’t trust you to watch my back it concerns me greatly.” He scrubbed the tin dishes with handfuls of sand and packed them away.
“Don’t you worry yourself none about me,” Spooner said, his eyes brick hard.
Marwood watched him across the low campfire. “I have to worry if a man is preoccupied with himself and not watching his job. It’s my life that worries me.”
Spooner picked up a pebble. He rolled it around in his hand and let his breath out in a long hiss, like steam from a kettle. “I got me a woman,” he said low, “like I done told you. I ain’t seen her in a long time.” Pause. “Long time.”
“I heard something about how you had family up in Bexar.”
Spooner nodded. “In the Laredito. There was a boy afore I left. I’m his father and I couldn’t tell you if he’s alive. Think about that, Mar.” He threw the pebble away. “Hell, I couldn’t feed them or keep them in clothes, so I lit out. But my woman, Sarah Anne, she’s alone up there with the boy, and her sick mother, and an old blind uncle who never did nothing but slouch in a rocker and eat boiled eggs and shit himself. I guess I ain’t seen them going on five years now. Near close to six, mebbe.”
“You want to see them?”
Spooner shook his head in an incredulous manner. “You got any family, Mar?”
“No.”
“Well.” Spooner didn’t say more. The two men bedded down while the stars wheeled overhead.
“I can’t remember my family,” Marwood admitted.
“Well,” Spooner said again, “only what’s remembered is ever worth knowing in the first place. Otherwise, best leave it alone.”
They caught up with Botis and company many days later. The excommunicate had moved off from Comanche Springs in search of new targets.
“Them Buffalo Soldiers came back after you and Spooner left,” Spaw told Marwood, “so we had to skeer. The captain, he never did have the patience of glass. He’s got a tear on something fierce for them now.”
They found a Mexican traveller sitting on the side of the road. His burro had died and he had no money to eat on. He had pulled his dead animal under a shade tree and was cutting on its hindquarter, eating the meat raw.
Botis asked him where any estancias or rancherias were in these parts. The traveller said he thought there was a large one to the south, five miles from the border. Mexican squatters, Botis asked. Yes, the man nodded, there were some Mexicans there. They had a church.
“Them’s the sons of bitches we’re looking for,” Lovich said.
“Yes,” said Botis, “it appears so.”
They gave the old Mexican food and water, and two American paper dollars, before riding away.
They came upon an isolated estancia that had been proved up. There were quarter horses stabled in a painted barn, and fifty head of longhorn cattle browsing on prickly pear cactus and haulms of grama. They were settled in the middle of nowhere.
“This ain’t them, Captain,” Lovich claimed. “We haven’t come near south enough like that old Mexican said to.”
“No, Daniel,” Botis agreed, “it’s not them, but they will do.”
Botis waited until the family and ranch hands sat supper before he kicked in the door. He made them kneel outside, their hands crossed on their heads. Rota and Spaw set fire to the furniture inside the house and barn, and shot the screaming livestock. There were eight family members and two work hands. Botis capped each in the head, stopping once to reload. By the time he got to the last victim, a dark-eyed girl of fifteen, Dan Lovich had returned with a grain shovel.
“You want to keep this one alive, Captain?” Lovich asked.
Her head was pushed forward into her slim hands and she sobbed. She wore a white dress with blue ribbons on the shoulders. Botis mounted his blue roan. The horse stood like a rock upon the ground, its long mane and tail blowing in the wind.
“We have a camp slut,” Botis said, gathering up the reins.
“I thought we might could use us another one,” Lovich explained.
“Can’t spare the water.” Botis turned his horse away.
Lovich reared back and hit the girl on the back of the head with the blade of the shovel. She fell forward and trembled as her brains leaked from her ears and nose. One of the scouts, Red Thunder, put his foot on her back and scalped her. The long black hair made a wet stripping sound when it came away from her skull. Red Thunder whirled the scalp. Blood dripped on his naked chest and sprayed his face.
There were whoops and gunfire into the air as if something within the company had been released and given voice. Many of the men bent to take trophies—hair, ears, and teeth—stuffing them in their belts or rolling them up in leather mochilas.
Jubal Stone and Spooner lassoed the mutilated bodies and dragged them into a row. Lew Spaw and another man, Sam Decker out of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, picked them up head by foot and threw them into a stone cistern used to water livestock.
That same night they hit an outfit trailing cattle up from Brownsville. The cattle were milled down for the night. They shot the trail boss—a man named James W. Slocum out of Dallas—and his two sons, and fired the chuck wagon. The remaining cowboys put up a sporadic fight before they gave way and fled into the gathering darkness.
Marwood found a Sharps rifle and a box of .52-50 shells under a pile of firewood in a separate supply wagon. Carr
ying torches and waving blankets the company stampeded five hundred head over the lip of a slot canyon. The animals lay five and ten deep, shattered bones and twisted bodies, a heap of broken flesh in the bottom of the canyon. When the sun came up they burned two more settlements, riding into wickiups and shooting bleary-eyed squatters in their beds. They fell upon a Spanish mission in the middle of nowhere. Botis tore down the altar and set fire to the church. People fled before them, hands covering their heads, as they rode through other colonias. The next colonia they entered the squatters were gone, and the streets and buildings were long deserted.
By week’s end they had shot and killed a deputy sheriff out of Fredericksburg delivering government papers to one of the forts, and they stole six horses from a posada in Crockett County.
Two days later, they stopped and took stock of themselves.
They pushed south, crossing and re-crossing the border, playing tag with a tatterdemalion group of Texas Rangers that jumped them on a creek bank. They rode the night through and lost the Rangers over hard, rocky ground.
On the Ides of March, with a brisk south wind blowing, Botis removed a pair of range glasses from his saddlebag. Marwood had never seen their like. The tubes were cemented inside the empty shell of a red-eared turtle; they were an ungainly, bulky contraption. He watched as Botis put them to his face, grinning with satisfaction as he swept the country with the lenses to reconnoitre another town half a mile away.
They kept the sun behind them so no light flashed on buckles, conchos, or metal bridles. After Botis glassed the town and its mud streets, they backed off and retired to a dry wash enclosed by a stand of trees.
Rachel knelt beside Botis like a supplicant attending a black mass. The riders gathered ’round.
“We have a contract to fulfill,” Botis told his command. “I want no misunderstanding or hesitation on this point. Except the contract has become one of our own interpretation. This ride through Texas did not change us. It has liberated us. Now we choose our own path among men, and make our own world.”
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