by Blake, J
He was up and walking in two weeks and another week after that was deemed well enough to serve as a wagon guard on an ammunition train to Querétaro a hundred miles south. But he was in truth still very weak and on arrival in Querétaro was taken with bone-wracking fever and a fierce case of bloody diarrhea. He was laid in the garrison hospital tent already crowded with men suffering from sickness of every sort. Day and night the dead were carried out and placed in the deadcart to be trundled to the graveyard and new patients were brought in to replace them.
The nurses were dedicated girls and women who brought in food and carted out slop jars, tried to feed those who could eat without throwing up, did their best to comfort the dying. He was for a time delirious more often than not but was sometimes aware of his hand being held. In his delirium he sometimes saw Maggie at his bedside dressed in black and weeping and sometimes he saw her naked and asking if he wanted to do it, saying that she would do whatever he wanted because he was her brother and she loved him and had no one else in the world who loved her. Sometimes she was so radiantly beautiful he wanted to weep. But sometimes her body was covered with ugly rankly suppurating sores and her face grotesquely distorted and his horror ran in his blood like ice.
Other times it was Daddyjack he saw sitting at the foot of his bed and grinning like a fleshless one-eyed skull and saying, “Look at ye now, laying in you own shit and caint hardly pull a proper breath thout it hurtin. Hell, boy, ye aint really worth a whole lot now, are ye?” And sometimes he was back in the smoky rainsoaked carnage of Monterrey, seeing the sundered flesh and hearing the unworldly screams and smelling effluvia so horrid it might have come from the bowels of hell.
15
When at last he surfaced from the fever he found his hand in that of a young nurse who said her name was Elena. Her mestizo eyes were as darkly bright as indigo pools under moonlight. She had been educated by Jesuits and spoke English well. She called him Juanito and said they had been sure he would die but she had prayed every hour that he would not. He had been there nearly two weeks and was shrunken to hide and bone and he ached to his very marrow. She told him he had often screamed of people with strange names but he was all right now and needed only rest and nourishment and time to regain his strength. She told him of Santa Ana’s victory over the gringos at Angostura—which the Yankees called Buena Vista—and of the high price paid for it. Many more on both sides had been killed at Angostura than at Monterrey. Much of the talk, Elena told him, was of the San Patricio Company that fought so valiantly, though almost half of them were reported killed. She knew little else about the battle but at his urging undertook to find out what she could. She learned that neither Juan Riley nor Lucas Malone was listed as killed, that in fact Juan Riley had been promoted to captain for his brilliant leadership and bravery in the fight. Moreno had been made a colonel. Santa Ana’s army was now back at San Luis Potosí
A week later he was sitting up and taking broth and his fever was much reduced. So great was the need for hospital beds that Elena was granted her request that he be discharged into her care. She took him home where she lived with her mother. Her father had been an educated man of Spanish bloodline, a Creole, and as an officer in Santa Ana’s army in the war against Texas had been killed at San Jacinto. She had no brothers. The mother was a wizened thing who kept to her tiny room whose walls were hung with crucifixes and whose shelves held dozens of saintly icons and where she passed her days and nights in whispered prayers to them all.
She fed him and bathed him until he was strong enough to do for himself. She kept him apprised of the progress of the war. Taylor had returned to Monterrey and was apparently under orders to stay there.
In mid-March came reports of a Yankee landing just outside the Gulf port of Veracruz. The city was refusing American demands to surrender. Three weeks later she brought home the news that General Winfield Scott had bombarded Veracruz for three days and nights. The city had suffered terrible destruction before finally capitulating. Everyone was saying that Scott would now begin marching inland to the mountains and then on to Mexico City and there the war would be decided. And there were rumors now, she told him, lowering her voice as though she might be overheard in her own house and perhaps thought a traitor, that Santa Ana had lied about Angostura, that it had truly been no victory.
By the first days of April he was strong enough to walk and he took most of his meals outside in the flowered patio behind the house. Swallows came to water in the small fountain and he fed them crumbs of bread. Elena was a wonderful cook and even when he was not hungry he could not resist eating at least some of whatever she prepared for him. She got clothes for him and he put aside his uniform except for his boots. They took walks down to the nearby creek and had picnics in the shade of the alamo trees along the banks where dragonflies drifted drowsily on the air.
One sunny afternoon at the creek she asked him why he had turned against the United States and chosen to fight for Mexico. He smiled and said, “Because I wanted to fight for you.”
She blushed and lowered her eyes and said, “That is a pretty lie. You did not even know me then.”
And he said, “I knew you. I just didn’t know your name or where you were. I just hadn’t met you yet.” He wondered where these words had come from. He felt they were true but wondered if maybe his mind had come unsound. Yet he smiled at her and at himself because he didn’t care if he was crazy. If this was what it was to be mad, he thought, then damn him to hell, it’s mad he would be.
She looked at him closely, her bright black eyes roaming his face, her small smile sad in a way he couldn’t comprehend. But when he leaned to her she raised her face to receive the kiss.
He felt he was home.
But still he was visited by dreams of Daddyjack who often came to him in the black heart of the night and showed a yellow grin and fixed his burning red eye on him and said, “Ye aint deservin and ye know it. She dont know ye for what ye are.”
He’d wake sweatsoaked with Daddyjack’s laughter in his ears and Elena would hold him close and coo to him and tell him not to fear, that the war was far away. And slowly his heart would ease from its runaway gallop.
She brought news one day that Santa Ana had sent a portion of the army east to cut off the American advance from Veracruz. The San Patricios were said to be part of that force.
He was surprised by his indifference. The war had come to seem somehow unreal, something far away and unconnected to him anymore.
He walked up the hills every day and ate with appetite and felt himself growing stronger. One moonlit evening they went hand in hand to the main plaza and listened to the guitarists and drank lemonade and ignored the disapproving looks of the women in their rebozos and the priests in their black gowns. And on the way back home they stopped under a wide shade tree through which the moonlight dripped like honey and they kissed. And when they got home they made love and all the while he held her naked flesh to him and breathed the redolence of her smooth brown skin and soft black hair he could hear the whispered prayers of the old woman in the adjoining room.
One day in early May she came home with a fever. “I will be all right in a few days,” she said. “Many of the girls at the hospital get sick for a few days sometimes and then they are all right again. It is nothing serious, you will see.”
But the fever worsened in the night. She tossed and moaned and the sweat poured off her and soaked the sheet. She was on fire all next day and night but she smiled weakly and told him in a hoarse whisper she would be fine in another day, he’d see. He stayed at her side and bathed her forehead with cool water and sang softly to her.
On the third day the fever was raging. She soiled herself and wept with the shame of it. He cleansed her and kissed her and begged her to get well. But the fever rose still higher and she became delirious and could not hear him telling her he would care for her as she had cared for him, telling her how beautiful her eyes were and her breasts and how he adored the sound of her voice. He do
zed periodically, woke each time with a start and clutched her to him the better to feel her heart beat against him.
And then the fourth dawn broke through the alamo trees and eased in the windows and he started awake from a hazy stifling dream that rang with mean echoing laughter and she was in his arms with her eyes wide and dried blood on her chin and she was dead.
16
There was an evening wake and ancient women in black rebozos wailed and prayed loudly without pause until he thought he would go mad from the monotony of it. The mother did go mad, now shrieking like a cat and throwing herself on her daughter’s bier, now pointing at him and screeching, “Tú! Tú eres la razón que ella está muerta! Tú, condenado gringo! Tú!”
In the morning she was buried and none among the mourners offered him a consoling word. Even in the graveyard some glared at him with open hatred.
He went directly from the funeral to a cantina and started drinking and did not stop until he passed out at a corner table. The barkeep knew him for a San Patricio and let him be. When he came to in the next forenoon he started right in drinking again. That night he ran out of money and so traded his tunic to the bartender for a bottle of tequlia. When that was gone he swapped his boots for two more bottles.
The next day he was arguing with the bartender about trading his trousers, which the bartender did not want, for another bottle when an army sergeant and two privates came in and told him he was under arrest. He broke a bottle over the sergeant’s head and gouged the jagged end into his face as he fell. The privates fell to clubbing him with their rifle butts but he twisted the weapon away from one of them and shattered the boy’s teeth with the butt plate and then whirled the rifle around and fired it point blank into the third soldier’s heart. The boy with the smashed mouth fled through the rear door.
He was having his second drink on the house when a half-dozen soldiers came through the door and the sergeant-at-arms pointed a pistol at him and told him to put his hands up or he would kill him.
John laughed at him and spat on the floor between them and hooked his thumbs in his belt and leaned back against the bar.
The sergeant cocked the pistol as the bartender lunged over the bar and cracked John on the back of the head with a sap fashioned of twenty silver pesos in a leather pouch and he crumpled insensate to the floor.
17
Four days later the back of his head was still tender. He was in a cell and awaiting court-martial on a charge of murder when Colonel Francisco Moreno, Captain John Riley, and Sergeant Lucas Malone showed up and presented the garrison commander with a paper signed by President Santa Ana himself. They were immediately escorted to his cell. They all looked worn and none was smiling. While John’s manacles were being removed Moreno him asked what happened.
John looked at him and shrugged. “Somebody got killed.”
“They said something about a girl.”
John looked away, then back at him. “There aint no girl.”
Moreno turned to Handsome Jack but he looked away. Riley seemed irritable, impatient. Moreno studied John for a long moment and then sighed and his air became professional. He informed him that Santa Ana had reorganized the San Patricios into an infantry battalion of two companies of one hundred men each and named it the Foreign Legion. Moreno himself was battalion commander and Riley and Saturnino O’Leary commanded the companies. Santa Ana wanted the unit up to full strength right away and was granting pardons to every jailed foreigner willing to fight under the San Patricio banner. More handbills were being smuggled into Yankee camps urging desertion to the Mexican side and there were reports that dozens of foreigners in Mexico City had enlisted in the Legion in the past few weeks.
“Scott’s pushing to Mexico City,” Riley said. He was nearly twitching with agitation. “Santa Ana’s pulling the whole army down there to make a stand of it. We got to get over there quick, man.” It took John a moment to realize he was pleased to see Jack Riley so apprehensive about his own future.
“I guess the sooner we get down there and kick Scott’s ass the sooner you get to be a general in this man’s army, eh Jack?”
Riley’s eyes narrowed. “Listen boy, I dont know what’s happened to ye here and I dont care a damn, not right now. We aint got the time for it, goddamnit. You rather stay here and be hanged for a murderer, just say so.”
Lucas Malone laughed tiredly and said, “Easy does er, boys. We all of us strung a bit tight just now. Come on, Johnny, let’s get on over to Mexico City. It’s nothin to do now but stick together and fight for our ownselfs.”
John let a heavy sigh. “Our ownselfs, Lucas? Hell man, who is that?”
“Dont play the fool with me, boy,” Lucas Malone said sternly. “Do it with Jack here all ye want but dont try it with me. Ye know damn good and well we of a kind—you and me and Jack here and all them other fellers in the compny who deserted the other side.”
“What the hell you mean ‘and Jack here’?” Riley said, but Lucas ignored him.
“Hell boy,” Lucas said, speaking more softly now, “you think you the only one feels pure-dee no-count and lost in the heart? The only one the good folk look at like it’s prison or the noose waitin for ye wherever ye go in this world?”
John looked at him.
“You know what the hell of it is, Johnny?” Lucas whispered.
And he realized that he did know, yes.
“The true and burnin hell of it is, the good folk’re right about us. We know they right. It be the drizzlin shits to know it. And it aint nothin to do about it but admit it and live with it the best we can.”
Riley hooted. Moreno gave them all a puzzled look.
“You’re so full of bullshit, Lucas,” Riley said. “Dont be including me in any such bunch of fools.” He looked from one to the other of them and suddenly laughed. “If you two think you aint but common jacklegs, that’s fine by me. Hell, it’s what I think of ye both meself—crazy jacklegs, truth be known. But as for me, well, I’m a right fella and I dont mind who knows it.”
John felt himself smiling. They were none of them anything for certain in the world but rogues, the lot of them, and their daddies all rogues before them.
He stood up and put on his hat. “Well hell, Lucas,” he said with mock seriousness, “I feel ever so much better by them words of wisdom. I must of been simple not to understood it before.”
“What ye mean, must of been?” Riley said. He nudged Lucas with an elbow and gestured at John. “Fella’s talking like simpleness is some past affliction rather than his natural condition.”
John grinned and said, “Piss upon you, Jack,” and threw a lazy punch that Riley easily slipped with a head roll.
Major Moreno looked on the three of them laughing and punching each other on the arms and shoulders and shook his head. And then laughed along with them. And said, “Vámonos! A la capital! Victoria o muerte!”
“Victoria o muerte!” cried Riley, making towards the door with a raised fist.
“I once knew a old gal named Victoria,” Lucas said as they trooped away. “Tits like a milk cow and a ass like a mule. But mean? Whooo! That woman’d just as soon kill you as kiss you, and you never did know which she was gonna try.”
“That aint the Victoria old Moreno’s talking about,” John said.
“Hell it aint,” said Handsome Jack.
VI
EDWARD
1
They left behind them in Laredo eleven dead and more than a dozen maimed or wounded on that cool March dawn when they broke the blackbeard Jaggers out of jail and accepted Edward into the company as well. Only one of the dead was their own. They were fifteen that departed at a gallop and in a great raise of dust bore due west, Edward on the Janey horse he’d recovered along with his guns and outfit from the livery where he saw a large painted Indian impale the stablebuck to the wall with a pitchfork through the neck. As he put heels to his mount he caught glimpses of men sprawled in the street in the awkward attitudes of death and splotched dark
with blood. He saw a woman kneeling at a water trough with her back bloody and her face submerged in the gray-pink water. Saw a dog crawling on forelegs and dragging its bullet-smashed nether half. Saw a small boy staggering in the street with blood in his eyes and then abruptly trampled under the hooves of the horse express rumbling out of town and out to open country. In that galloping band the Janey mare looked like a blooded darling in contrast to the motley bunch of yet half-savage horses that only weeks earlier had been running wild on the desertland and now wore bridles of plaited human hair adorned with clicking bones and teeth.
The company went unpursued.
They made camp that evening in the hills. The Janey horse was white-eyed fearful at being tethered amid the mustangs. They jostled her and snapped at her with their teeth. One lunged and bit her flank and she spun and kicked the pinto so hard it trumpeted and shied away and thereafter the mustangs mostly let her be.
The company’s fires tossed and swirled in the sandy nightwind and the men supped on the haunches of an antelope brought down with a Hawken gun at well nigh six hundred yards by a deadeye named Runyon who had been showing off. Jaggers introduced Edward to Geech and Finn and Huddlestone, who sat about the same fire.
They were going to Chihuahua under contract to the governor to hunt Apache. The deal had been closed in the neighboring state of Coahuila where the company had been recruiting itself and squandering its pay in Saltillo cantinas and cathouses after weeks of chasing down a fearsome bandit gang in the Sierras de San Marcos for the Coahuila government. They’d returned to the capital from the expedition with fifteen heads dangling on either side of a blood-stained pack mule including that of the infamous Pablo Contreras which of its own brought them one thousand pesos in silver. The alcalde himself identified the head as Contreras’s and the governor ordered it displayed on a lance head over the main portal of the municipal building.