In the Rogue Blood

by Blake, J

  They met one forenoon with a pack train bound from Pachuca for the coast. The lead rider reined up and grinned at them and took off his sombrero and shielded his belt pistol with it. Dominguez did not wait to see if he was going for his gun but simply pulled his Colt and shot him in the face. The man tumbled from the saddle and rolled off the trail and plunged into misty space and the other guards were still unslinging their rifles as the gang gunned them down in a thunderous enfilade that echoed down the canyon walls. They killed too all the muleteers but for three who escaped into the forest. The compañeros made away with satchels of freshly-minted silver specie and fifty mules loaded with coffee. The animals and the cargo they sold to a broker in Tulancingo who asked no questions.

  They resumed the sierra trail and rode downcountry without haste. A week later a Mexican army patrol came wending up the mountainside behind them. They set up an ambush on either side of a narrow pass and caught the patrol in a crossfire and put down more than half the cavalrymen before the rest were able to retreat. They gathered up the fallen soldiers’ mounts and weapons and then rode on toward Jalapa. A few miles north of that town they met with a guerrilla chieftain, a ranchero named Lucero Carbajal whom Dominguez had known since boyhood, and they sold the mules and all their extra horses and guns to him and then took supper in his camp.

  Dominguez wanted to visit Jalapa, a lovely place of gardens and orange trees and weather unsurpassably fine. But Carbajal warned him away from there. A month earlier General Scott’s army had crushed Santa Ana’s troops in a ferocious battle at Cerro Gordo, some fifteen miles southwest of Jalapa, and sent the broken Mexican ranks running for their lives. The Napoleon of the West himself had fled the field on his pegleg and was said to have finally arrived at Orizaba and begun to reorganize his army for the defense of Mexico City. Scott’s army was now ensconced in both Jalapa and Puebla and all the talk in the cantinas was of the gringos’ preparation to begin their move on the capital. The only real resistance the gringos faced between Puebla and Mexico City, Carbajal said, was that of the ranchero bands led by such as himself, Padre Colombo Bermejillo, Anastasio Torrejón and José Miñon. They had each been harassing the Yankees with hit-and-run raids on their supply trains and with sniper attacks on their columns. They regularly trailed the gringo patrols and killed the stragglers and mutilated their remains in order to frighten their comrades who found them. But despite the rancheros’ continuing guerrilla raids, the American victory at Cerro Gordo had cleared their route to Mexico City and the war was sure to reach the capital soon.

  The Yankees weren’t the only problem, Carbajal said. The alcaldes of Jalapa and Pueblo had told the gringo commanders that most of the local ranchero gangs were nothing but bandidos looking to enrich themselves under the banner of patriotism. The bastards had given the gringos a list of names. They were all on that list, Carbajal said angrily—himself, Dominguez, Bermejillo, Torrejón, everybody. He knew the local people hated them for bandits and wanted to see them all dead or at least behind bars but he’d never thought they hated bandits so much they’d turn to the goddamned Yankees for help. Dominguez smiled over the rim of his tequila cup and said it surely was amazing that some people could hate a bandit just because he robbed and killed a few of their friends and neighbors every now and then. Carbajal grinned back at him and shrugged. He said the locals knew Dominguez and his gang were back in the region because two surviving muleteers of the Pachuca pack train had brought back the tale of the robbery and of the killings of the guards and the other drovers. It was widely supposed that Dominguez was headed back to his native city and both the local police and the Yankee army were on the lookout for him. It would be unwise to show his face in Jalapa, Carbajal told him, and even riskier to appear in Puebla.

  Dominguez shrugged and thanked him for the information and advice and then they passed out bottles to their compañeros and there ensued an evening of drinking and singing and the two chieftains told stories of the old days when they were boys just starting out as bandits. And before daybreak Dominguez and his gang were mounted and on their way.

  26

  They came through a high pass and into view of Puebla on a bright late afternoon and sat their horses on a high ridge overlooking the city and listened to the tolling of church bells. Dominguez sighed and said, “Ay, que linda ciudad!” Beyond the city’s perimeter rose the presidio of Loreto with the American flag fluttering over its gates and some few of the compañeros cursed through their teeth but most were as indifferent to one flag as another and shrugged at their fellows’ ire. Dominguez put his mount forward onto the downward trail and the company followed after.

  It was Mexico’s second largest city and the tidiest Edward would see in his life. The streets were perfectly-paved with cobblestone and shaded by trees. In every plaza there stood churches and convents ornately trimmed with colorful glazed tiles. In the central plaza loomed the imposing Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception built by the Spaniards two hundred years before. It was Sunday midday and the last masses of the morning had just finished. The streets and squares were thronged with people in their finery and priests and nuns in flowing black robes and habits. Fredo Ruiz, who detested the Catholic Church as a personal enemy, looked about at the multitude of clerics and spat. “La Roma de Mexico,” he growled.

  The plazas sparkled with fountains and were lively with musical bands and fireaters and jugglers and clowns from the local circus. There were street vendors of fresh fruit and tamales and charcoaled meats and gimcrackery. Patrons crowded the arcade shops and cafes. And everywhere they saw Yankee soldiers, most of them strolling wide-eyed with wonder at the city’s ancient beauty and agape at the lovely girls who smiled at them over their lace fans as they were hurried along by scowling dueñas. The Yankees paid the gang no mind, but in the shadows of the arcades were some who watched intently as the compañeros passed by and they recognized the bandit Dominguez and some of the other riders as well and made visual inventory of their weapons. And then they followed at a distance.

  They boarded their mounts in a livery off the main plaza and there washed themselves thoroughly and then bought new clothes at a haberdasher’s and had themselves barbered and pomaded and shaved and powdered. Their longarms they stored with their horses but those who were following and watching took notice that every man of them wore a pair of Colts under his coat. They sat for dinner at a banquet table in a fine restaurant where Dominguez several times had to hiss at some of the less urbane of his fellows about their faulty manners. They attracted much sidelong and murmuring attention from the surrounding tables and many of the compañeros were pleased by it, but not Edward, who felt most of the attention was of the sort one saw at a zoo and most of it was directed at him for the bandanna on his head. He was tempted to remove it and really give the gawkers something to whisper about but he checked the impulse.

  They next repaired to the corrida and bought seats in the shade and drank beer and cheered those matadors who braved the bulls’ horns most daringly and artfully and cheered too the bulls who fought and died well. They ridiculed and cursed those few matadors whose ineptness or fear made for an awkward show and was taken as insulting to a noble bull. Several among the compañeros joined other disgusted aficionados in tossing cupfuls of piss down upon these disgraces to the matador’s art. It was Edward’s first witness of the corrida’s pageantry and blood rituals, and the good fights stirred him in a way he had not felt since his young boyhood in Georgia when he saw Daddyjack stab Tom Rainey dead. Each time he shouted “Ole!” in unison with the crowd as the bull lunged at the matador’s swirling cape and its horns brushed the front of his spangled jacket he felt a tight excitement all the way down to his balls.

  Exiting the plaza de toros into the encroaching twilight of early evening the compañeros were all mildly drunk and eager for women. Dominguez said La Mariposa was the best house in the city, but Pedro Arria, who was also a Poblano, believed Las Flores Picantes was a better place. Half the boys wanted to g
o to the one and half to the other. Dominguez said he would meet them all the following afternoon in the main plaza and then headed off by himself.

  “Where’s he off to?” Edward asked Spooner.

  “See his wife, most likely,” Spooner said. He laughed at the look on Edward’s face. “Hell, boy, ole Manuel’s been married since before I met him. Bout four years, I believe. Name’s Laura. I aint seen her myself, but some of the boys have, and they say she’s a right beauty. Know what his great sorrow is? Him and his wife? They aint got no kids. Tells me they try like hell ever time he comes home but they just aint had no luck that way.”

  Spooner went off with Pedro and his group to do their sporting in Las Flores and Edward and Chucho and the rest made their way toward La Mariposa. As they passed the lamplit main plaza they paused to admire the pretty girls promenading in the company of their dueñas at the evening paseo. A brass band played merrily as the women strolled about the perimeter of the plaza in one direction while the men circled in the other, smiling and giving each other appraising looks as they passed. The moon showed bright white through the trees. “Andale,” Chucho said after a minute. “Estas hermosas me tienen de rabia por una mujer. Vamonos!” They left the plaza and went another two blocks and turned down a long and darkened alleyway and arrived at La Mariposa.

  27

  Edward’s girl was a sexy but sullen wench who coupled like the act was an imposition. When he had done with her he did not want to linger and got dressed while she lay naked on her side, smoking a thin cigar and watching him with hooded eyes. But neither did he want the compañeros to make fun of him for having been so quick about it and so he rolled a cigarette and sat on the bed and smoked it. The room was small and lighted by a single candle and their smoke swirled blue and clung to the ceiling in webs. Neither of them spoke. When the cigarette was down to a nub he crushed it under his boot and went out and shut the door behind him. Chucho just then came out of another room down the hall and they grinned at one another and headed down the stairs and at the middle landing found themselves staring down at more than a dozen cocked rifles pointed at them from the brightly lighted parlor floor. Some of the riflemen wore police uniforms, some did not.

  “No se muevan, carajos,” said a man with a raised pistol in his hand. He was the chief of police and his authority was proclaimed by his uniform, the most elaborate in the room, topped by a stiff-crowned cap with a silver badge pinned to its front. Two of his minions came warily up the stairway and relieved Edward and Chucho of their Colts and prodded them the rest of the way downstairs. They were made to sit on the floor with their hands under them and their backs against the wall. The chief told them that if they so much as shifted their weight they would be shot for attempting to escape. He examined their Colts and smiled and handed his flintlock to an aide and cocked a revolver in each hand and turned his attention back to the stairway landing.

  A few minutes later Cisco appeared on the landing and his face fell at the sight of the ready rifles. He put up his hands and was disarmed and ordered onto his hands beside Edward and Chucho. In this way were all the compañeros in La Mariposa put under arrest. All but Gustavo the seminarian who as always was the last to finish his business with the girls because after sating himself on them he always spent a while trying to persuade them to give up the whore’s life. When he finally came down to the landing and saw the riflemen and the chief said, “No te mueves, cara—” he went for his Colts and the rifles all fired at once and knocked him back against the wall amid splatters of blood and he pitched headlong down the stairs and rolled to a crumpled heap and the chief stood over him in a gunpowder haze and emptied both Colts into him as Gustavo’s blood soaked the carpet in a widening red stain. Not until both pistols were done blasting did Edward hear the high steady screaming of the women of the house.

  They were eight of them manacled and taken out to the street and led off toward the jail. People had come hurrying from the plazas to see what was happening and the chief told them to keep their distance. The gawkers followed along on either side of the line of chained men in the wavering light of the street lamps, talking excitedly about these captured bandidos and heaping imprecations on them. One of the plaza brass bands joined the procession and added to the festive air with a lively tune. Now some of the boys snatched up stones and pelted the prisoners who cursed and tried to shield themselves with their arms and the police laughed at them along with everyone else.

  The jail was a communal cell, a long stone room set in the rear of the main municipal building of the central plaza. It had a wide door of steel bars and the floor was covered with straw the color of mud. A single heavily barred window was set a dozen feet above the floor and rose almost to the ceiling. The compañeros were unmanacled one by one in the anteroom and shoved inside. The cell was dimly lighted by small candles set on the floor and by lamplight falling through the door from the anteroom. It stank powerfully of sweat and human waste. Slop buckets stood in the corners. Most of the two dozen inmates already there had been comrades of some the compañeros in earlier bandit gangs and there were greetings and nods of recognition and bittersweet abrazos.

  Barely an hour later the eight compañeros who’d gone to Las Flores Picantes were brought in. Julio had a broken wrist and Fredo’s cheek had been fractured by a rifle butt and the half of his face was swollen grossly and purple as a plum. Spooner had lost his hat. He sat down beside Edward and sighed. “Aint we the dumb sonsabitches, lettin em slick up on us easy as that?”

  “They aint got Manuel,” Edward said. “Could be he’ll get us out of here some kind a way.” He surprised himself by saying it and more so by believing it. He was recalling how Captain James Kirkson Hobbes had dealt with the arrest of one of his company.

  “Don’t believe he will,” Spooner said, and spat into the straw.

  “And why not?” Edward said, irritated by Spooner’s air of defeat.

  “Because right there he is.”

  A knot of policemen led by the chief had brought Dominguez into the anteroom. He was held by a policeman on either side of him and his hands were cuffed behind him and his mouth was bloated and bloody. His shirt was torn and he was hatless. The hair about his right ear was matted with blood. A knot of compañeros converged on the cell door and were warned back by the jailers. The police chief grabbed a fistful of Dominguez’s hair and directed the bandit chiefs attention to the men in the cell. “Ya lo vez, cabrón? Hay están tus chingados compañeros, lo mismo como te dije! En dos días los colgaremos a todos. Todos! Te lo prometo!” He rammed his knee up between Dominguez’s legs and the bandit groaned and sagged in the grip of the men who held him. Now Ortiz stepped back and said, “Tíralo adentro!” and the men holding Dominguez dragged him to the cell door and flung him inside and a jailer clanged the door shut and turned the lock.

  28

  Later that night they sat around a guttering little chunk of candle and Dominguez told Spooner and Edward how he’d been mounted on his wife and was right on the brink of coming when his head suddenly burst with stars and the next thing he knew he was on his face on the floor with his hands manacled behind him and a boot sole pressing hard on his neck. He’d always been careful in going to his house, always taken roundabout routes through side streets and back alleys and crowded marketplaces, always taken precautions against being followed. But this time he obviously hadn’t been careful enough. The police had with them a pair of Tarascan Indians who sneaked into his house and up the stairs and into the bedroom and went right up to him as he was fucking his wife and he’d never heard a thing until his head exploded.

  When he regained consciousness a pair of policeman were holding him fast, one on either arm. He was surprised they hadn’t simply shot him in the back and been done with it. Then he saw that the police chief was Huberto Ortiz and he understood why they had not. Ortriz greeted him with a wide smile and a punch to the mouth that smashed his lips and loosened his front teeth.

  “Ortiz, he hate me sin
ce we are little boys,” Dominguez said. “We fight and I win him. We race and I win him. We dance and make love with the señoritas and I win him. All the times I get the more pretty ones. He hate me because he never can win me. When we are hombres I make together my gente, my compañeros, but he don’t want to call me el jefe and so he make together his own gente, but they never can steal so much like my gente can steal. He never so good like me at nothing, Ortiz, from the time we are muchachos. So he hate me, you see. Is simple. Is why he want for all the peoples to see me hang. Is more shameful for me than he shoot me, and is more better for him if the peoples see me to hang. He can say to everbody, ‘You see all this bad mens? You see this bad hombre Manuel Dominguez? I am going to hang him for you and you can see him to die with your eyes.’ He will be more famous, you see.”

  “And now the bastard’s the chief of police?” Spooner said. He chuckled. “Aint that always the way?”

  Dominguez’s smile was twisted on his bloated lips. “The peoples, they want a policemens who can make them to feel safe, you know? Somebody strong for to protect them to the bad mens like Manuel Dominguez.” He laughed without humor. “They want for to see me be hang, this damn peoples.” He looked up at the high dark window as if he might scale the wall to it and look out on all his fellow citizens who wanted him dead. He spat.

  He made no account of his wife and neither Edward nor Spooner was so impolite as to ask after her. It was sufficient to know she had been naked in the bed when the police came in. It required little imagination to know what happened thereafter, and they knew that had it been otherwise Dominguez would have said so. But he had not.