Quaternity

by Kenneth Mark Hoover

  It was an act of selfishness on her part to keep him as close to her as she could. To anchor him to this world. She knew that was a sin.

  But she had lost, too. She had lost her life and her family. Now all she had left was the fire, and she wasn’t sure that was enough.

  One night she did not make the signal fire. She knew what would happen next, but she also knew there must be a reckoning between her and the goatherd. She was not surprised when the goatherd came to her through the clouding dark. His ghostly form walked up the slope of this meseta and he sat showing his bone-scalped head and his dripping wounds, and asked why she had abandoned him. She told him she, too, had been abandoned, that there was no one to build a fire for her in this world.

  The handsome goatherd reached into his chest. When he withdrew his hand there was a small blue flame in his palm. She took the flame and she swallowed it, and the stone melted in her heart like ice on a hot comal. The goatherd rose and turned to walk away.

  “Where are you going,” she asked him.

  “I have given you everything I have,” he said. “Now I must leave to be judged by God.”

  “I will always light the fire for you,” she told him.

  “That is the nature of fire,” he said, and disappeared into the dark never to return again.

  No one spoke when she finished the story. Botis watched the flames for a long time. His face was unreadable.

  The men got to their feet in ones and twos. They asked the bruja if she wanted to go to Presidio with them. They told her they would fight for her and keep her safe. They told her they would come back and keep the fire burning, if she wanted such a sacrifice on their behalf.

  The old woman declined the offer. “Voy a morir aquí,” she said. She patted the wooden settle she sat upon. “Aquí.”

  They gave her money, what meat they could spare, and a pouch of salt. Marwood was the last to leave. She brushed his hand with hers.

  “Usted es un hombre solitario.” She held his hand pressed between both of hers. Her hands were cold and he could feel the bones under her paper-thin skin. “Tienes que ir al norte.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “I am not who you think I am.”

  She nodded emphatically. “El hombre solitario. Norte.” She pointed to the Great Bear, and the circumpolar stars that blazed with jewelled fire. “El fuego guema. En la tierra de nieve grande.”

  “That is not my home,” he said. He disengaged his hand from hers and went to retrieve his horse.

  He did not want to, but as he was riding away he turned and looked back. She was standing in front of the fire. Gifts of food and salt lay at her sandalled feet. The updraft from the bonfire lifted the tattered remains of her mantilla, revealing a skeletal face with yellowed flesh, dark eye sockets rimmed with salt, and an open maw that could swallow worlds.

  “La sangre de diez mil làgrimas es sobre tu alma.” She placed a hand over her bosom and cried, “Tu alma!”

  Marwood’s heart hammered and his throat was dry. He had lingered too long. The rest of the company were riding single-file down the mesa. He reined his horse around and larruped it away.

  “Tu alma.” Her high-pitched voice followed him through the desert air, swirling and bouncing off rock. “Tu alma.”

  In Presidio they rode past multi-storeyed pueblos of adobe blocks and mud mortar. Wood smoke and wind-driven dust paled the burning air and stung Marwood’s eyes.

  Jumano Indian women baked bread in hornos built from sandstone and lava rock. Young girls, their limbs brown and firm, stoked the open cook fires and baked blue corn piki on flat rocks. Marwood watched other women boil vegetables by dropping hot stones into gourds, as their forebears did thousands of years ago.

  Naked children, boys and girls alike, ran between the big American horses, their dirty hands outstretched. Some had ringworm, bowed legs from rickets, or suffered syphilitic scars from birth.

  Botis kicked at them. “Get away from the horse.” But on sudden impulse he pulled light rein and threw down a handful of tlacos. The children dove and fought for the copper coins like cats. Botis chucked Acheron forward and left them scrabbling in the dust.

  Presidio was a sad-looking colonia of mud-washed adobe houses, slumping jacals, and open-air tiendas with sagging porticos. Men from the barrial sat on the street under thin, leaning shade, and smoked coarse tobacco rolled in cornhusks.

  Lovich smelled frying chili peppers. He dismounted, leaving his horse ground-tied. The Cajun followed in his wake. Following his nose, Lovich shuffled into a low-ceilinged bodega. Boxes, crates, and an old seat from a Concord wagon served for furniture.

  “You speak American?” he asked the proprietor.

  “Sí. A little bit.”

  “We need salt and beans and side bacon,” he told the proprietor. The Cajun picked absently through a hooped barrel of old bones the local farmers ground and used for fertilizer.

  The man who owned the bodega wrinkled his brow. “No más tocino,” he said. He bore an old machete scar across his naked chest under a coarse-woven shirt. His pants were held up with rope and his feet were bare and horned with yellow calluses.

  “What have you got if you ain’t got bacon?” Lovich asked.

  “Perro,” the storekeeper said. He shrugged. “Just as good to eat. I promise the Virgin.”

  Lovich frowned at this. “No cabrito?” For, in truth, he was partial to smoked kid, more than any other man in the outfit, and loved to get it whenever he could.

  “No más cabrito,” the proprietor replied. He snapped his fingers under his nose, as if trying to awaken Lovich from a walking sleep. “Perro. Perro.”

  “I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to eat a dog,” Lovich said.

  “The men won’t sit still for it, neither.” The Cajun pulled a coyote jaw from the barrel to examine it. “Bad enough we had to eat one of our goddamn horses in the bush.”

  The proprietor shrugged. “Is all we have. Lo siento.”

  “I’ll bet you’re sorry,” Lovich said. “Are you telling me this goddamn town ain’t got nothing to eat in the way of meat?”

  The man standing before him shook his head. “No más tocino. No más de cabra. Los Indios. Muy malo.”

  The Cajun’s head jerked up. “Indios?”

  “Sí,” the man said. “Mescalero.”

  “Where are they?” He dropped the coyote jaw and came forward. “We been hunting them savages since we left Bexar.”

  “Ruidosa,” Botis said.

  Lovich nodded. His eyes slid toward the horizon. “That’s what the man said, Cap. Up through the Chinati Mountains. He said there’s a regiment of convicts who guard Ruidosa from Indian attacks. Mean bunch of bastards. They fight each other all the time. Seems to me we can get a piece of that ourselves.”

  Botis turned to Marwood. “Have you ever been that far west, Mar?”

  Marwood shook his head. “I’ve been south to Saltillo.” He didn’t have to elaborate among these men what job he might have been doing there. “That’s all rough country, though.”

  The abrupt gunshot made them turn as one. Calvin Zapata walked out of a taberna. He turned and lifted his hand as if to wave goodbye. Another shot from within the dark interior hit him square in the chest. He collapsed to his knees and toppled sideways. Immediately, two more shots from a bigger gun sounded inside the cantina. Jubal Stone strode out next with a Walker Colt smoking in his right hand.

  “Goddamn, Cap,” he called, “somebody up and shot Calvin in the back.” In Stone’s other hand was a pocket five-shot .28 calibre Paterson. He showed it to them. “With this here gun.”

  The men gathered around Calvin lying dead in the street. “What happened?” Botis asked Stone.

  “We was talking. This cobber from Kansas went to get him a drink, and when he came back he pulled his gun and shot poor Calvin in the back.
Calvin lurched to his feet and this Jayhawker burned powder on him again. So I pulled my gun and put two .44s into him. He’s in there. But he’s dead now.”

  The men walked into the dimly lit place. There was an overturned chair in the middle of the room, which Marwood had to step around. An older, sandy-haired man lay on the dirt floor in a dark pool of blood. A frightened bartender stood in a far corner trembling like he had the ague. Botis kicked the dead man over with the toe of his boot.

  “He ain’t nobody we know,” Botis said. “Mar?”

  “I’ve never seen this man before.”

  Lovich spat and shook his head. “It don’t make sense to shoot Calvin,” he said. “He was just a boy. He never did nobody no harm.”

  Doc Quillen entered the cantina. His hands were bloody. “Calvin’s dead all right, Captain. Ain’t nothing I can do for him.”

  “Did Calvin have cross words with this here dead man?” Botis asked.

  “What words, Cap?” Jubal Stone holstered his Walker and shoved the Paterson inside his coat jacket. “We was talking, and when he came back to the table he pulled out a gun and shot Calvin in the back.”

  “Goddamn,” Lovich said, “he must have been looney. Why would anyone shoot Calvin for nothing?”

  No one said anything for a long, dark moment. Jubal Stone removed his hat. He wiped the sweat from his wrinkled forehead with the ball of his thumb. “It don’t figure out.”

  “It doesn’t have to,” Botis said. “It never has to.”

  The alcalde of the town questioned them briefly, but they had no more information than before. The alcalde said this red headed stranger had ridden into town two days ago on a malandered burro and was looking for piecework in the fields.

  Botis and his band rode out of the colonia. As they were negotiating a narrow pass through the Chinati Mountains, stepping their horses around igneous boulders and scoria, Jubal Stone raised his voice in question.

  “I don’t see how you mean it don’t figure, Captain,” he said. “The world has parts, and they’re knowable.”

  Botis led them on for another half mile. When they came to an open ledge he drew rein. Below were raddled lands and orange hills that wobbled and sheered in the awful heat. A long reef of blood-red herringbone clouds chased orange sky into black. Blue mesas with crimson tops rose like mansions on the measureless horizon.

  Sitting his horse Botis took out his clay pipe and filled it. He lit it and flipped the match at the ground. “There is no order to the world,” he said. He might have been talking to himself. “The order men perceive in Nature and the world around them is but a reflection of their disordered minds.” He puffed his pipe. “Order has no natural existence in the universe, and the universe does not recognize man as an integral part of its own existence. Nor should it be so, for man himself is a being separate from all other things, even unto himself.”

  The pipe was out. Botis knocked the dottle from the bowl and pushed his hat back on his forehead. “The west is the best killing-fest there ever was,” he told Stone, “or ever will be. That’s what you have to remember.”

  His philosophical doctrine of red butchery rendered, he spurred Acheron down a steep saddleback ridge. Juniper and cactus grew in isolated hummocks between chines. Everything here was slowly being eroded over time. Marwood believed these rain-starved plants would one day tumble to the bottom.

  The killers held their reins a little tighter and rode into the waiting cauldron below.

  CHAPTER 12

  They rode through the starwheel of night and into another day.

  The wind picked up. Before long it became a maelstrom. Sand and rock chips struck Marwood’s face and hands. The men tied canvas and cowhide to shield themselves, but the pellets left pin-prick bruises and mottled blood spots on every unprotected area. Later, when Marwood shucked off his boots, a half-cup of sand poured from each one.

  The horses endured the worst. Their heads were hooded to protect their eyes. The riders dismounted to lead them best they could, but the horses kept trying to tail into the wind. Marwood dug in his heels and pulled at his mare. The remuda was whipped to drive them forward. As the day lengthened the howling wind would not let up. As the sky darkened into night, Marwood and the others were moving through the world more by feel than by sight.

  By the meridian of the second day the sun was nothing more than a brown disk in a burnet sky. When Marwood looked up he saw turbulent roils of dust obscure its face. The coils would twist and writhe, and break into separate shards much like frightened dace in a millpond. Then, as quickly as it had begun, the wind died out and the dust storm ended.

  Now he rode through a preternatural world of eerie silence. Naught was heard but the huffing of horses and clomp of hooves, kicking through overturned stone and scree.

  “Goddamn this,” Spaw said.

  The sifting dust scattered aeneous light, making everything around the company glow as with fairy fire. The world became reversed—the sky rose dark and the ground was bright—and Marwood thought if a man was not careful he might begin to doubt his senses. Glare beat upward into the faces of the men. Dust continued to swirl, collecting in the creases of their clothes and brims of their hats.

  Then, Marwood saw a thing he would have never thought possible. A column of rain clouds built up in the north and threatened to blow their way. The temperature dropped twenty degrees. Away to the west, a second, larger dust storm threatened.

  The two forces collided directly overhead, transmuting with a thunderclap that shook the world and startled the horses. Dust and rain, wind and a wailing vortex. Marwood watched the collision, and the mud that formed. Immense rippling sheets, limitless lobes of aerial mud warped, bent, and torqued as unbalanced forces worked upon them. They spun, coacted into delicate helixes, were sheared apart, and fell.

  It rained. It rained mud, and it did not stop. Marble-sized globules, some half-frozen, splattered the ground. Eyes and mouths of men became gummed, faces mired and unrecognizable. The men riding next to Marwood looked like they were wearing dirt masks and mud sluiced from their lowered hats. The horses walked with their heads down; their muzzles and long tails dripped. It continued to fall in a steady patter until Marwood believed they were being beaten by the sky itself—punished by irate gods for sins past, and future given.

  The weather eased twenty minutes later. The mud shower ceased. Within an hour all was bone dry. Mud flaked like lizard scales from their flanks; choking dust rose from the horses’ hooves. Men tied bandanas around their faces so they could breathe.

  They rode on, watching the blue Cordilleras shimmer in the distance—from one extreme to the other. Marwood’s tongue was swollen with thirst. Darkness rode up on their backs and Botis called a halt. There was no moon; clouds obscured the stars. All was black as pitch.

  They endured a night’s encampment with neither food nor fire. They were too tired to eat, too close to the Mescaleros to risk a light.

  Marwood collapsed on the ground. He sat with his arms hanging at his side, palms up, eyes unfocused. It had been one of the most exhausting days of his life. Worse than the pit in Laredo. Worse than anything.

  No one spoke. No man had the breath or the strength to speak. Usually, when they gathered around at night, they had time for talk. Tonight, Marwood watched men fall asleep while sitting upright, and they did not move again until morning.

  Early light. The eastern sky burned. Botis went around kicking everyone into life. Horses saddled, they ate parched corn and a mouthful of water, and rode the sun full up.

  By midday they came to a field of impaled Mescalero Apaches, and halted.

  Lovich counted twenty-three naked bodies: men, women, and children, all frozen in horror—mouths torn open, eyes burned blind from the desert sun. All had been scalped and mutilated beyond recognition, their skin stretched like taut muslin over corded muscles and petrified bones.
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  The oaken stakes were set deep into the hard earth, with supporting rocks surrounding their base. Their points were fire-hardened. Sam Decker dismounted and, leading his grullo, stood in the middle of this grim planting. He lifted one of the base stones, examined it curiously, and put it back exactly as before.

  Nothing moved. The air was filled with buzzing flies. Most of the male victims were impaled through the anus. Two were upside down by their throats; one was transfixed directly through his trunk, with a leg hooked over his body, secondarily impaled. The women, five by count, were speared through the groin, the sharp tip bursting through their sternums. The top of the stakes were purposefully set underneath their lower jaws so gravity could not work them toward the bottom. Their breasts had been removed and their abdomens flayed open. Blackened viscera hung like mangled rawhide from the wounds. Two babies and a four-year-old toddler shared a stake. A metal ring was hammered two-thirds down so that their small bodies remained suspended above the hard-packed earth.

  Lying against a large boulder were more honed stakes, and holes newly dug into the ground. Seven holes were already deep enough to receive both stake and the fresh weight of a struggling body.

  The Cajun lifted one of these stout posts, twelve inches at base and ten feet in length. He levered it into a prepared hole. The bottom third of the stake chunked vertically into the rock-hard ground, and fit true.

  “Leave that, Amos,” Rota said.

  “How come?”

  “It ain’t right to disturb a graveyard.”

  The Cajun looked at the pole he had planted and thought better of removing it again. He got on his horse.

  Five miles on they discovered a deserted mission. The roof had caved in, the ’dobe walls crumbled and sloughing now that the main support was gone. The men kicked through the dusty ruin. Inside the sacristy Marwood found the remains of two Spanish priests called by God to anoint the heathens with the Blood of Christ. One was beheaded, his head placed in a brass piscina. They had been stripped, tortured, and scalped. Both men were castrated, and one had a crucifix tucked in his buttocks.