Quaternity

by Kenneth Mark Hoover

  “I am not happy with busthead or chock,” Botis said.

  “No, sir,” the bartender said in a hurried manner, “I see you are not. I’ll pour your drinks right away.”

  “Make it a bottle so’s I don’t have to crack it over your fucking head.”

  “Yes, sir. One bottle of twenty-five-year-old Glenlivet. Our only bottle. Coming up.”

  The bottle and glasses were produced and Botis laid down the required coin. They drank. Twenty minutes later, a town sheriff with a phalanx of armed deputies came into the bar and addressed Botis.

  “Gentlemen, I would ask you to lay down your guns and come peaceably with me.”

  Marwood moved his hand along his belt and closer to the butt of his gun.

  Botis caught his arm and shook his head. He turned slowly around. “How can I help you, Sheriff?”

  “I am placing you under arrest for crimes against the State of Texas.”

  “What crimes have we committed against Texas?”

  “Well, you broke the hand of a town marshal in Del Rio with a split maul, for one.”

  “He probably broke his hand pulling his pud. What is the name of this unfortunate?”

  “Marshal Bill Ikard.”

  “Don’t know the man.” Botis turned away. He poured the last of the Glenlivet into their three glasses.

  “Sir, do you deny you shot and killed a deputy sheriff outside Fredericksburg?”

  “Never been to Fredericksburg. Not near a hundred miles of the place.” Botis swallowed his drink. “I got no kin there,” he said low.

  “Do you also deny you burned homes and killed innocent men and women along the Mexican border?”

  “Burned homes, you say? By God, I’ll deny it. Who levied this calumny against me? I’ll shoot the son of a bitch in his sleep.” Botis faced the lawman, leaned toward him. “Sounds like you got Comanche trouble on your hands, Sheriff. You goddamn Texas shitheels better get things in order before every man’s son, and woman Christian, is done for and de-virginized by them savages.”

  “Now look here,” the sheriff blustered. “I am not going to argue the point.” He touched the pocket of his coat. “I have a state warrant for your arrest issued from Austin—”

  “Sheriff Owen, if I may intrude one moment,” commented a man who had emerged from the ringing crowd. He wore an expensive brown cattleman’s suit with a silk string tie and a grey Stetson. “I believe I can clear this matter up to everyone’s benefit. These gentlemen you are interrogating have been in my staid employ during the entire time in question. I will attest to that in any court of law.”

  “Why, Mr. Lancaster.” Owen was flummoxed. “I don’t know what to say. I am surprised at you, sir.”

  “Well, I do know what to say,” Bob Lancaster went on. “I expect another telegram from Austin is waiting on your desk, which will obviate that state warrant mouldering in your pocket. Please, let me explain . . .” He made to pull the sheriff aside.

  The lawman was having trouble, however, accepting these events as they transpired. “How long have these men been in your employ, Mr. Lancaster?” he asked.

  “Since the Dawn of Creation,” Botis boomed from over his shoulder. “Go on, son,” he told the sheriff in a low voice, “it’s over.”

  “Sheriff, if I may explain further . . .” Lancaster laid his arm around Owen’s shoulders and drew him away.

  Botis grinned at Lovich and Marwood. “Once he’s done with that sheriff I shall accept his terms of surrender. Our Mr. Lancaster does not want his fine reputation sullied. Nor does he want to end up like the good Mr. Frierson. Ah, here he comes now.” He slapped two gold double eagles on the bar.

  “You boys have yourself a time,” he said. “I’ll be back shortly.”

  “For what is man’s mind but a caution of madness? The stars, man. The stars were wrong. And I believe then, as I do now, that Botis opened a seal unto a corridor, which does cross worlds. A rift between mountain and moon. Where a man might travel without misstep or tribulation.”

  Lovich drained the last of the colonche from a clay jug. “In truth, Mar, he, too, carries the Nameless One inside—like you—and it pushes him to find its way home.”

  “Well, boys,” Botis said, once he emerged from the Governor’s Palace, “we are posted out of town. But do not despair. Father Botis has found a new line of work.”

  “And what might that be?” Marwood asked.

  “We are going to work from sunup to backbreak for the state of Texas. Apaches, gentlemen. It appears they really are having Indian trouble out west. We have been charged with a private contract to see what we can do about it.”

  It was mid-dawn in the Laredito, cool and clear. They stood on a wooden sidewalk watching sporadic traffic roll past. On the street corner a Mexican woman fried chili peppers on a stone comal. The aromatic smoke drifted through the street.

  Lovich had his back propped against one of the wooden sidewalk posts. His head was in both hands. “Oh,” he said.

  “That is, unless you nimblejacks have other ideas,” Botis said, not expecting any.

  “Well, Captain,” Marwood spoke up, “I have no great love for Texas, but I have been thinking on this a spell.”

  Botis was clearly taken aback. This man before him was not known to ask for anything.

  “All right, Mar,” he said with care. “I’ll hear what you have to say.”

  “Captain,” Marwood said, “I want to find Cibola. I can’t remember my past, but I think I come from there. Just like you, and I think I’ve got to go back.”

  Marwood had the sun behind him. Botis narrowed his eyes to look full into his face. Whatever he read there, he kept to himself for the remainder of his days. But it was enough to satisfy his mind and answer any questions he might have raised on the spot.

  Botis smiled with no little surprise evident on his broad face. “I guess that’s what we shall do, Mar. Daniel? What say you to this idea?”

  “My head hurts,” Lovich said.

  “Then it is unanimous.” Botis slipped a black cigar from his vest and lit it with a sulphurous match. He flipped the spent match into the street.

  “Boys, get your horses,” he ordered. “We are going west, where the dragons live.”

  PART III

  The Mountains of the Moon

  Chapter 11

  The line of shadows from the riders moved in tandem along the broken ground.

  The Hydra was complete once more. Spaw and the remainder of the band were picked up in Del Rio. They rode together out of Hill Country onto the blasted wastes of the Edwards Plateau. To the north lay all of Comancheria, where no sane man dared go; to the west, the burning hell of the Chihuahuan desert. The days before them were long, the nights short and freezing.

  They nooned in an abandoned fort built by Indian traders. The fort was constructed against a lava mountainside. The bajada outside the structure was full of spindly ocotillo and cat’s claw. Gnarled stumps of pin oak had been sawn and lumbered to make the walls of the interior rooms.

  The main gate had been wrenched off its massive cotter pins and thrown down, as if from some great cataclysm. They rode through. The main walls of the fort were burned, breached by Mescalero Apaches in a night attack long, long ago. Nothing remained in the fort. After its capture, the interior of the fort was gutted and disassembled to feed Apache cooking fires, build travois, and repair tipi poles. The only thing the company found of any monetary worth was a pig of lead and scrap tinware. There was nothing else left to take, and Marwood could see that the hammering spring rains were slowly sloughing the adobe walls into slag.

  Deep piles of soot and ash and black coals were in frozen drifts throughout the enclosure. Spaw kicked at the petrified remains of a mule, its scabrous hide sun-dried to iron across a skeletal-ribbed framework. There was other trash here, too. Metal tongues from wa
gons, oblate wheel rims, flint knappings, and potsherds. Broken clay plates, a knife with no haft. Old clothes so crusted with black blood when Sam Decker pulled them apart they crackled like pine logs snapping in a kitchen hearth.

  Jubal Stone rolled a wheel rim out of the way so he could make room to sleep. He let the warped metal fall to one side with a clang. “Well,” he said, “these sons of bitches are around here somewheres.”

  They spent a frozen night in the abandoned fort watching a magenta sunset burn itself out. The Milky Way arced so bright Doc Quillen could read his Bible by it.

  Come morning they stirred and coughed, got the horses, and pushed west. On the trail Dan Lovich killed a porcupine. While they rode they ate the meat of the animal raw in their saddles. Over the course of the next few days Lovich used its quills to make a pattern on his gloves and the back of his coat. It was a large starburst of radiating colour, which diffracted light as the quills dried and reflected the sun. Sometimes the pattern changed with the temperature, becoming darker, or lighter, as the mercury fluctuated.

  Marwood often rode behind Lovich, and did so now. He could not recognize the design, but he thought it had meaning to him.

  While crossing the San Antonio-El Paso Road they held up a mail coach. Marwood shot the lead trace horse. They sent the driver, guard, and three passengers into the desert without their boots. The victims had an eighty-mile walk through Apacheria before them, with no food or water, until they reached the U.S. Army quartermaster’s supply station on Cibolo Creek.

  Rota lowered the metal strongbox from the coach. The Cajun could not find the key to the strongbox so he beat the lock with a pin hammer and smashed it open. Inside were mail contracts and letters of credit from Wells Fargo in El Paso. They burned the letters and government correspondence, ripped open mail pouches, and stripped the canvas off the wagon to use as shade during the heat of the day. Doc Quillen cut up the dead horse and laid sheets of red meat to dry on a flat rock. He brushed away swarms of snarling flies with his hat, and cut away the white eggs from those who did manage to lay them.

  The other three horses, fairly good stock from the coach, were added to their remuda. One of the older horses in the herd, a tall dapple usually ridden by Calvin Zapata, was seen limping. Botis examined the foreleg. It had a hairline fracture in the sesamoid bone. He studied the rough country and shook his head in despair.

  “What do you think, jefe?” Zapata asked Botis. Hope lay in the boy’s face.

  “No,” Botis told Zapata. “I’m sorry.”

  Tears welling in his eyes, Calvin went to Marwood. “I done had to kill one horse,” he said. His brown hands were thrust in his pockets and he kicked at the ground in frustration. “I don’t want to have to shoot another with my own gun.”

  Marwood took out his pistol and handed it to the boy. Calvin walked over, stiff-legged, like a man driven to a desperate task. He cocked the hammer and shot the dapple through the heart. He returned Marwood’s revolver and sat by himself for a good hour, unfit for company, sulking and snarling curses in Spanish when someone got too close.

  Following the robbery of the mail coach, and the increased possibility Mescaleros were buzzing around, Botis made the tactical decision to travel at night for a while. It was his intention they avoid notice until they could find the Apaches and fall upon them with wild vengeance.

  They rode past one of the cattle ranches owned by Milton Faver. During the day they holed up in the rugged lava rocks of a hillside, or the steep flank of a mesa. Between catnaps, Marwood watched the open country for movement. Come dusk the exhausted men rode, heads and backs bowed. Sometimes they reeled upright with a sudden jerk or a soft cry. Marwood chewed dry coffee beans to stay awake. In this fashion did they crawl across the level plains of tall yellow grass to Fort Davis, and by a sly southern route through desert scrub and volcanic cliffs, avoided the armed Buffalo Soldiers stationed there.

  When night fell once again they crawled from their freezing holes in the lava rocks like nocturnal spiders. As they saddled their horses, Spaw spotted a newly kindled fire on a wind-blasted mesa ten miles away. The riders drew nearer and dismounted when they reached a bajada. They led their horses across a black alluvial fan sloping upward in a gentle climb. The Tonkawas pressed ahead to scout. When they returned an hour later Lovich met them to hear their report.

  “They say an old dama is sitting alone on top of that mesa,” he told the men. Lovich shook his head in wonder. He leaned, spat, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Craziest damn thing I ever heard of.”

  Botis and company retrieved their horses and rode closer to the signal fire. It was a huge bonfire of everything ignitable in the desert: dried dung, rotten cactus and ocotillo, the occasional mesquite bush chopped and splined for kindling.

  A ten-foot square rock house with a shoddy roof of withy lathes stood outside the rim of firelight. The roof and corners were crooked, and the house cocked away from the fire as if it were an animal seeking the comfort of darkness. There was a single low doorway, little more than five feet high, with a stone lintel. Something was engraved on the lintel, but Marwood could not make it out in the shadow, even when he tried to trace it with his fingers. Two small windows, arrow slits at best, adorned one wall. The interior of the house—if house it was and not prison—was pitch black, and no man dared to enter it.

  The party walked their horses into the firelight. Marwood’s shadow stretched from his boots to meld and become one with the greater darkness.

  A venerable Mexican woman looked up from a wooden plate of raw lizard and a piñole of ground mesquite beans. She was dressed in black threadbare clothes and wooden huaraches. The ebony mantilla she wore, pinned with a bone peineta, was more straggled cobweb than elegant Andalusian lace.

  “Que es este lugar?” Botis asked her. He waited patiently for an answer.

  She chewed her mush of mesquite beans, refusing to even acknowledge his presence.

  “Usted está parado en mi casa de duelo,” she said. She picked a stringy bit of lizard meat with her fingers and nibbled.

  “Quieres hablar conmigo, vieja madre?” Botis asked.

  She put the plate aside, maintaining an air of solemnity. Something between her and Botis had changed. Her dark eyes ranged over him and his roughshod, shadowed men, arranged behind him like petitioners at the gates of hell.

  “Se puede caminar con los demonios,” she said, looking them over. She turned her gaze to Botis.

  “Sí,” Botis answered. He watched her carefully. He pointed to the men and to himself. “Con los demonios.”

  “Te diré.” She crossed herself and motioned to a patch of ground between them. “Sentarse, y te diré de los fantasmas del pasado que frecuentan este lugar.”

  The killers did as she asked and sat around her, resembling wounded acolytes at a roadside shrine. The Tonkawas remained outside the encircling presence of the bruja’s electric spirit. They were wary of all strange phenomena in the desert, including the salt ghosts that roamed the howling wastes, and other flickering fantasmas that pulled men’s spirits through their nostrils. They would have none of it for themselves.

  The bruja began to speak, and the men listened.

  “I will tell you a thing,” she said in Spanish, “and you will take it with you to the end of your days.”

  As she spoke she often looked at Marwood. He leaned close to listen. She told them when she was young and pretty she was engaged to a handsome goatherd. His name was not important, because over the years she had forgotten her own name. But the power of what she had to tell them this night lay not in forgotten names, but in deeds, and a measure of hope undone.

  She stopped talking to make sure they understood this. If they did not, there was little reason to go on with her story. The men listened to the night sounds close in around them. They told her they understood and urged her to continue. The old woman went on wit
h her halting story.

  When her lover was in the field, tending goats, she said, she would every evening climb a hillside that overlooked the valley and light a fire to let him know she was there. But a fortnight before they were to be married, Mescalero Apaches killed the handsome goatherd, and scalped him.

  She found his mutilated body in a dry canyon not far from this place. She buried him there, and also her heart. And for uncounted years, she had built a bonfire every Sunday night, so his grieving spirit would know its warmth, and remember her love.

  The bruja stopped to gather her thoughts. Now here was the part of the story that must be told, she warned. It was part of her life she sometimes forgot, but she remembered it now because these men had come out of the dark to listen. Some years after the goatherd died she did marry. For such is the human need to go forward and put the past in a corner where you can understand it. She did not love this man as she loved the goatherd, but she gave him children and there was happiness. They were all dead now, her family. The man had died, as old men do, and the children and their wives and their children’s children were all dead from wars or plague or burning famine. Yet she remained on this borderland mesa lighting her signal fire for the one lost soul she had ever truly loved.

  Sometimes, she said in a hushed voice, looking at Marwood, she was not sure she was real. Marwood felt his skin crawl. Maybe only her fire was real, she said. For fire was eternal, like man’s soul. That was why people sat before a fire and stared into it. They were staring into themselves. No other thing, no mirror, no god, could peer so deep into man’s abyss. Fire alone had that unique power.

  In other tellings this would be story enough, perhaps. But over the years, when she lit her signal fires, something grew heavy in her heart like a stone. She began to realize she hated the goatherd for leaving her with such a grim responsibility.

  It was her fires, you see, that kept him from crossing to the other world. Maybe even into hell. He would see the signal fire and stay in this world, and not go where spirits must to be judged.