Drifting Off the Coast of New Mexico

by Steven R. Boyett

  “Drifting Off the Coast of New Mexico” is an excerpt from Orphans, which is copyright © Steven R. Boyett, all rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by any means electronic or mechanical, without prior permission of the publisher, with the exception of brief passages quoted in reviews.

  “Drifting Off the Coast of New Mexico” was originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, June, 1995.

  Orphans ISBN: 1-931305-04-8

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  Drifting Off the Coast of New Mexico

  WELL, SIR, there’s bullets whizzing past us like we done shook up a hornet’s nest, which in a manner of speaking I guess we done. Bierce is face-up on the travois we made for him after he caught one in the gut outside a Ojinaco, and Tom’s pulling one pole of it and me t’other, and we couldn’t be leaving no clearer trail if we jumped up and down and clapped our hands and yelled hey. All I got’s my little Smith & Wesson slapping my leg like it wants out; I done lumped the Springfield in with Bierce on the travois cause it ain’t no good to me while we’re racing and wheezing along. It’s hotter’n a dutch oven in a burning house and we’re running low on energy and rounds.

  We’re too god damn old for this.

  Another slug goes whooting past my leg. Maybe it had my name wrote on it, but they done spelt it wrong. Anyways their shots are killing Mexican dirt more than anything else; Carranza’s troops are pretty near out of range and don’t shoot all that commendably to begin with. I ain’t sure they been allowed to have ammunition till recently, and if I was Carranza I’da found that a sound policy myself.

  Now we’re heading uphill and the going ain’t hardly fun at all. My lungs are on fire but I’m in pretty good shape for an old war horse if you don’t check my teeth. Tom’s having a tough go of it though. Sometime in them soft big-city years he done swallered a cannonball and has been lugging it around ever since, and right now he’s red-faced as a naked preacher and sweating like his hat’s squeezing it out of his head.

  Tom sees me looking at him and I guess he reads my worried look. Can’t hardly have a thought to yourself when you’re with a body too long; you may as well get married and have done with it. He nods, probably ’cause talking is pretty much out of the question. Then he glances at Bierce and back at me, and I know what he is thinking and I shake my head no, and my look says Shame on you for thinking it. Tom kind of shrugs — which is his reply to plum near everything anymore — and hauls on.

  Round a bend Tom recognizes another opportunity to slow down Carranza’s boys, so I grab up the Springfield from beside Bierce — it weighs about a hundred pounds more than I remember — and Tom drags the travois back a ways while I work the action and kneel down and wipe sweat from my eyes and put on my glasses and draw a bead. I feel another of my coughing spells coming on and fight it off long enough to steady that long barrel and squeeze off. That Springfield kicks like everclear and my shoulder’s already throbbing from plugging away.

  I get up and my knees pop and it hurts like a sumbitch — and then the coughing spell lays me up. When it’s over my lungs feel like they been scoured with steel wool.

  I set the Springfield alongside Bierce.

  “Get him?” asks Tom.

  I shrug and grab up my end of the travois. “If my aim was true, some fella wearing a coat with shiny buttons has got a plug tore outta his chest that a ’gator could use for a chaw. But waiting to find out is a good way to end up on the receiving end of some Mexican hospitality, I figger.”

  Tom don’t have no argument with that — for a change — and we set to pulling Bierce again. I hold my rifle out to get Tom’s eye. “Thomas,” I declare, “if I get out a this in one piece, I’ll visit Springfield and kiss the ground. I’d lay odds it’s good ground, too. Hell, it’s in Missouri.”

  Tom, he just pulls up one corner of his mouth. “It is that,” he says. “But your Springfield hails from Massachusetts.”

  It ain’t a quarter mile later Tom points out a big rock outcropping directly ahead. I size it up, then glance back behind us: no trail dust. Just them two wavy lines from the travois poles saying, Here we are, amigos. I figger them Federales think we mighta dug in back at that bend where I opened fire and are hanging back and trying to figure a way to ambush us. Leastways there ain’t been no bullets hissing past since then.

  I glance ahead at the rock. “It cuts off the path a good piece,” I say. “Reckon it’ll give us good cover?”

  Tom wipes his radish-colored face. “Reckon it’ll have to,” he says. “I’m pretty much wore out. Boots’re wore out, feet’re killin’ me, wrists’re throbbin’ from shootin’.” He rubs his wrist to emphasize his point.

  I look at him a moment. I got me a run or two left, I’m certain, but Tom’s right: he’s wore out. “Well,” I says, “if you’re tired, I’m tired too, hoss.”

  He can’t meet my eye so he glances around us. “Ain’t that the way it is with us, Huck?” he asks.

  “It is a fact, Tom,” I say, and we commence to dragging the travois up to the sheltering rock.

  “I can feel ’em, Huck.” Tom’s squatting in the narrow shade of the rock and using a thick yellow fingernail to pry a spent cartridge from one of his colts. “They’re out there.”

  I nod. “I know it.” I’m looking at the liver spots on his unsteady hands, the dark wet patches on his hat, the thick rope of gray hair falling round his neck beneath it. I can hear him breathing heavy with the heat and his own weight.

  He squints up at me. “They’re gonna know we’re here before too long,” he says.

  “I know that too.” His face has got all paunchy like the rest of him, but it’s still got something boyish about it, like as if age had only got added to it rather than changing it to something else like it’s done to the rest of us. What’s your plan, Tom? I’m thinking. You always was the one for plans. That’s why we’re here in the first place. Then I hear Tom’s own voice in my head asking You got anywheres else you’d rather be, Huck? And I got no good answer for that, so I go on up to Bierce.

  We got the travois snugged against the rock in the shade all ready for a fast getaway if it comes to that — though where we’ll get away to may be a point of some dispute. Bierce is pale as chalk with his head propped on his fleabit surplus bedroll. He’s breathing like a sat-on squeeze box, his white hair’s limp with sweat, and the bandage on his stomach is got a fresh patch of red edging past the dried brown. We got no more gauze, not even rags, so I decide I better check under his bandage to see what mighta got in there while we was dragging him across half the northern Mexican desert.

  “How’s Bierce?” asks Tom. He’s checking the cylinder on his second colt.

  “You deef?”

  “I hear just fine. And if I hear him at all it means he ain’t dead, so how close to it is he?”

  I try not to frown at Tom. That’s a cold thing to’ve said.

  Well, when I lift up the wrap, Bierce draws in a ticking breath. His wrinkled eyelids tremble and his scrub-brush mustache wags. “Still bleeding,” I say. “But not like before.” I mop his brow with my shirtsleeve and then put that against his mouth to wet it some. “Terrible to hear a fella breathe like that,” I say, retrieving the Springfield and standing. Sumbitch knees say hello again and I put a hand on one for support.

  “Give him water, maybe?”

  I hold out the bullet-holed canteen and Tom just makes that disgusted shrug again. “’Sides,” I say, “you don’t give water to a gutshot man.”

 
Tom snorts. “Do if there ain’t no more harm in it.”

  I think about this for a minute as I rub my knees.

  “He was a dog I’da shot him by now.” He thumbs the cylinder back in place and holsters the colt.

  “Tom.”

  Tom shrugs. He pulls his hat off and fans himself with it. I’m looking at a lot of graywhite hair that used to be flaming red. “Bierce ain’t no dog, Tom. Why you want to talk like that?”

  The fanning slows down like his hat’s waving underwater. “Maybe ’cause we wouldn’t be in this fix if it weren’t for him.”

  I lean the Springfield against the rock and lean beside it and take off my own hat. “Go on. I want to hear how you figure that.” That poor hat of mine is a vast ruin with a wide crescent lopped out of its brim.

  “How I figure it!” Now Tom’s all bricked up. “Who the hell talked us into comin’ down here to ride with Villa like a bunch of del Nortes? Like we was a pair a wet-nosed puppies?”

  I start to answer but he’s got up a good head of steam now and making a downhill grade. He points at Bierce and says, “Who put us ’round the outside of two bottles of Kentucky rye in that fleabag flophouse in Las Cruces and got us all shellacked-up about — what was it? — ‘fleeing the abandoned American dream and helping a people forge a nation with their workers’ hands.’ Pfff!” His hat slaps his thigh. It’s dry enough to kick up dust and makes me powerful thirsty to look at. “Near as I could tell, them hands work the lever on a Winchester more’n anything else.”

  I see that this can go on a spell, so I put my hat back on and work open the drawstring bag on my belt.

  “And you was all over the idea,” he says. “And now Carranza’s done made hisself president and here we are a-waiting for his boys to come put us down like a lame horse.” He looks around. “I tell you what, it’s some people and some nation.”

  I pinch a chaw from what’s left a my plug and put it into my mouth. It helps the thirst a touch, and even if it don’t it eases my lungs some. I chew thoughtfully for a minute — “for the effect,” as Tom used to like to say — and spit carefully. “As I recall, Tom, New Mexico was a stop on the way for us. We was headin’ to slap old Villa’s back ourselves, weren’t that the line you hauled me in on? ‘Missouri don’t want us no more, America don’t want us, we should head down Mexico way, there’d be some new stories told about us then, you can bet an ace of spades on that.’ Sound familiar to you, hoss?”

  That shrug again. “No one pointed a gun at your damn head and said come on.”

  I spit again. “Never was a gun as persuasive as your talk.”

  He starts to get mad, then all of a sudden my line hits him as funny and he starts to laughing. Hell, I start laughing with him despite myself. It’s like that with us.

  And then the laughter simmers down and Tom gives me the kind of direct look he don’t give much no more. He looks at Bierce and up at the rock leaning out above us and back to me. “So we’ll stop here, then, Huck?”

  I look at his watery blue eyes — one with a squiggly red vein worming along one side like the Mississippi on a map — at his flushed and sweating face, his boyish, tired face. “We been running a long time, Tom.”

  “Long time.” His mouth presses straight and he’s looking at me but I don’t think he’s seeing me. He’s a deep one, old Tom, and if I’m any judge, he’s seeing Hartford and the comfortable big lonely house he put on the block, and he’s seeing Colorado, where there weren’t no silver for me, and he’s seeing New York City and all them tall buildings he’s left behind, and he’s seeing Texas, where I coulda come up with more inneresting ways a getting my head blowed off than riding with the Rangers. And he’s seeing St. Petersburg, which we made the mistake of going back to once and found it just crawling with ha’nts for the both of us. It broke Tom’s heart and then some, going back to St. Petersburg, and neither of us talked much about Missouri though I knowed he dreamed about it sometimes.

  And then he sees me like I just appeared in front of him. “Thing is, Huck,” he says, “all this time we been movin,’ and I don’t know if we been running from or runnin’ to.”

  Now, I don’t know what he means by that, but Tom’s always saying things I don’t know what they mean, and I’m used to it.

  On the travois Bierce coughs wetly and we look to see his leg jerk and his head raise and lower. He’s got that certain stillness as I go on over to him and fresh red is spotting his dirty bandage and it’s drawing flies and I just know he’s dead, but I set an ear close by his nose and listen a spell. “Still with us,” I tell Tom, and I hear the surprise in my voice.

  “Tough old geezer.”

  “If that ain’t the pot calling the kettle black.” I tighten Bierce’s dressing and mop his brow again, even stroke his hair back a couple licks. I try not to pay attention to the little flecks of red in his mustache since there ain’t nothing I can do about them anyhow.

  I straighten up and take off my hat again and rub my head. Catch Tom peeping at me. Usually he ribs me about my bald patch. He’s just green cause I never did go gray, though he wouldn’t admit to it under Chinese torture.

  Bierce grunts once like a snuffling hog. “Glad he ain’t awake for this,” I tell Tom. “Gutshot ain’t nothing you want to be around for. Saw enough a that in the War to last me a lifetime.”

  Tom don’t say nothing. The War is something he don’t talk about much.

  I had got fed up when Missouri couldn’t make up its damned mind about whether or not to fight and who they should fight for if they did. If Missouri was a mule deciding ’tween two piles a hay, it would have starved to death. I coulda done as good calling heads or tails. Well, when I see they are just going to keep on talking about it like that will settle the issue, I lit out for Ohio and signed up. Nearly got myself killed by Northern and Southern alike the whole way up and over.

  I tried to talk Tom into coming with, but he wasn’t having none of it. He was all took up with some woman he thought he was in love with, and his attention was mostly going her way and I admit I felt a bit put out. It pained me something awful to split with Tom, but he didn’t ease it none. We had ourselves a pretty good row before I abandoned ship, and it was some piece of years and miles before we patched it up again.

  In Ohio I tried for cavalry, but by that late in the War they wanted you to bring your own horse and I didn’t have one handy. But I could ride shank’s mare well as anyone with two legs, and so I became a footsoldier in the regulars — till they learned how much of the Ole Miss was tucked away in my head, and then I became a Union river pilot. Most their boats was taken — “commandeered,” they had it, if they wasn’t “liberated” — from the Confederate states. Hell, I’d stowed away on some of them myself, before the war.

  Now, I’d heard tell there was a Union regiment of nothing but niggers. I asked around about them, sort of indirect and quiet, because I didn’t want no one asking why I wanted to know. Coming from Missouri didn’t hardly stand me in good stead, and if you think them Union boys loved niggers more than any Georgia plantation owner did, you best set and have another think.

  I was looking for Jim, of course. He’d lit out a year or so before me — for real and final this time — and me and Tom was about the only ones knew he’d made for Ohio. I wanted to know if he’d made it, and j’ined up like he said he would. To me, a nigger spending that much effort and risking his neck to get himself away from all that, only to grab himself a rifle and come right straight back, was full-on crazy. Which meant Jim had probably tried it all right.

  Tom, he stayed behind in Missouri. His cousin Sid — always a trial when we was boys — had growed up to be a right decent fella, if you ask me, though he was stiffer than a Louisiana jail sentence and nowhere near as inneresting. Sid moved to St. Louis and opened up a little print shop, and Tom ’prenticed to him as a printer’s devil and learned the trade. By a curious coincidence, it wasn’t long after that, that some pretty riling abolitionist pamphlets began b�
�iling up all over that part of the South — mostly in St. Louis. I got hold a some and saw Tom writ all over ’em, signature or no. I never let on I’d seen ’em, and Tom never let on he’d done anything more during the War than print-jobs for Sid.

  Funny thing, too: after the War Tom moved about as North as you can get in every way ’cepting geographically — he went to work for C. L. Webster and Co., a book publisher in New York City. That was where he growed that cannonball in his breadbasket and watered-down his Missouri speech something awful. Me, I went where I always go when everything comes unbuckled.

  “Say, Huck?” Tom’s voice brings me clear back from the Mississippi. He’s nodding at Bierce. “He look familiar to you?”

  “Never saw him ’fore New Mexico, I’m sure.”

  “Me, neither,” says Tom. He looks a touch uncomfortable. “But he reminds me of someone and it’s buggin’ me like a tick.”

  “Ain’t sure who?”

  “No. But I’d bet real money that hair of his used to be red as mine.”

  I start to say Red as yourn used to be, you mean, but decide agin it. If Tom wants to go on thinking he’s a redhead, that’s all right by me. From my experience, “redhead” is more a philosophy than a hair color anyway. “Well,” I say instead, “he don’t remind me a nobody ’cept himself.”

  I spit, and give Tom a sidelong look. “They say a fella knows he’s gettin’ on in years when everybody ’minds him a someone else.” I laugh, and that starts me up to coughing again, but it isn’t a bad spell this time out, though it hurts ’cause my throat’s like a dustbin.

  “Well, I’m still a boy, then,” he says, “’cause you sure as hell don’t remind me of no one I used to know.” His Irish is up good now. “You’d sooner blow off your own big toe than float your lanky ass down a river for some damnfool cause.” His laugh’s bitter and a little mean.

  “It’s gospel, Tom,” I agree. “That’s why I’m here with you in Mexigoddamnco, hidin’ behind a rock and blowin’ my big toe to kingdom come.”