Toward the end the singer reproaches himself. He says that these methods would be too easy. Too abrupt. He has been selfish. He has sought an end to his own misery. His body should be saved as a more lasting tribute to the young lady.
Yes, by far the best way to honor her would be to stagger slowly to a drunkard’s grave. He would drink pulque, tequila and aguardiente. He would become sodden and depraved. His disgrace would be an epic of its kind. Then when strangers looked upon him they would ask how such a youth had fallen so low. And others would explain that he became the village drunkard because of his vain love for Señorita Dolores or Señorita Manuela or whatever the name chanced to be——
By this time, if the liquor ceremony has been observed, the acting is quite realistic. Which is not strange when it is considered that Mexican liquor comes from the same plant which provides the native with shingles, nails, coarse cloth, needles and fodder for cattle.
And the song ends on this convincing note.
A DESERT DAY
Crimson and gray smeared in streaks that might have been done by an amateur with water-colors. Except for the live glow of vermillion along the edge of each gray streak. This was the touch of genius.
The desert sky early in the morning. It reared itself at abrupt right angles to the long, flat stretch of dead land. Back of the streaks of crimson and gray were long, straight lines of the sun’s rays—a child’s drawing of a sunrise.
“Nature is a bungling artist,” mused El Humoristo, sitting up in his blankets and shivering. “Every day a new, daubing experiment; always hoping for an accidental that will justify spoiling so much canvas.”
Along the desert edge suddenly burned a ridge of liquid copper. There came bronze into the sky, and lavender and gold. There was the translucent, cool green that is in an ocean wave just before it flings itself on the breasts of waiting rocks.
The metallic brilliance of the sky was reflected in the endless reach of sand. Except for the ridge of living copper it was impossible to tell where the sky started and where the desert ended.
The grotesque plants of the desert, in the first gray light, had looked as depressing as furniture draped with cloth covers. Now their sinister leaves caught glints of the sky. They blossomed with mad colors.
“More experimenting,” said El Humoristo, as he watched. “Except for the touch of live red, palpably stolen from Innes, Nature is painting as badly as ever this morning. Well, she’s patient. And there are many days.”
The camp stirred. Men heavy with the morning silence. The farewell caress of the night wind, going back to its cave in the hills, was cold. Their sarapes were pulled over their noses.
Even these hardened campaigners were a little stiff after a night sleeping on the bed of the desert. The sarapes smelt of men and horses. With the dust ground in them, they felt greasy and slippery. The yellow gray of the dust streaked hands and faces as if they were made up crudely for character parts on the stage.
There wasn’t any water for washing. The last of it had gone into the coffee cans. Rank coffee made a soothing smell. The smoke from the fire was a long thread of lilac and blue. The smell of coffee and wood smoke and the smell of horses had a familiar comfort in them.
A Desert Day
Talk began at the fire. Mexican jokes to start the day. Enrique was sure there had been a rattlesnake in his blanket. Silvano said that if the snake had bitten Enrique, the snake probably had crawled away into the brush to die miserably. Its fate, El Humoristo remarked, would have been even worse if it had been a female rattler. This was an excellent joke. They laughed as they ate.
They laughed even though it sharpened the risk of including a fly or two in what they ate. The flies were thick and hungry. They foraged boldly. It was no use killing them. Other flies were ready. So they patiently waved one hand over the food and scooped it up with the other. This waving had to accompany the food to the lips. Even then, sometimes a desperate fly would dart on to it just as the food was popped into the mouth.
Yet they risked laughing and the slacking of vigilance it brought. They were still chuckling when the last frijole had been scooped from the common pot. Cornhusk cigarettes made thin veins of smoke. The riders of the desert looked more lightly on the scarcity of water. It was a familiar enough menace.
By noon they would reach the water-hole at Charcos. The real heat of the day did not begin until after that. There were more jokes as they went to their horses. The animals looked more miserably miskept than usual. The streaks of gray dust brought their skeleton ribs into relief. Only where the saddle-blankets had been was the dust wiped away by sweat. Most of them had sore backs. Some of them had worn their saddles all night. El Humoristo’s horse was an exception. His compañeros laughed at the care the accepted gringo gave his horse.
Capitan Vicente spoke to his eighteen men. Capitan Vicente had a white scar from the point of his chin to where his left eye had been before the knife made the scar. It plowed a white line through the black stubble of his beard.
He told them that they were in for a hard morning of it. Let them ride carefully. There could be no waiting if a horse collapsed. By the following morning they must be at their chief’s rendezvous at Santa Cruz.
They were not impressed with his oratory. He was always making speeches. All mornings were hard in the desert. Their mounts sagged as they settled into the saddles.
The horses made their first few steps as if they were dragging some tremendous cart out of the sand. Then they seemed to get momentum. Their hoofs scuffed along in the tireless, monotonous shuffle of desert animals.
The streak of liquid copper had melted from the rim of the horizon. The sun had lifted itself over the far edge of the desert. It saw the tiny procession marching and marked it with long, indicative shadows.
The men were singing La Cucaracha. Two buzzards had been stretching their wings and legs in an obscene and ludicrous setting-up exercise. Their stale bodies made a sound of gristle and feathers stirring. Silently they took wing and glided over the little column.
. . . . . . .
The sun was almost overhead when the band made Charcos. They sensed disaster before they could see the shallow saucer that was the water-hole. They could see it in the slumped body of Capitan Vicente, who had ridden ahead. The water-hole was dry. Dry and white as the skulls of cattle which marked the trail to the spot.
One of the buzzards sent his shadow skimming across the dry shallow. The men did not look up. They did not need the symbol to remind them. Capitan Vicente shrugged his shoulders and dropped his arms in a helpless gesture. He had been wearing smoked goggles that fitted close to his eyes. Pushed back, they left two dark sockets staring out of the gray powder that was in layers on his face. His gesture was a tragic surrender to fate. His face was a comic sketch of a ridiculous owl winking one eye.
The men answered with shrugs as their horses halted. One by one they filled the dry water hole with a flood of rich expletives. They personified it that they might better insult it. They laughed a little as the youngest of the riders, a boy of seventeen, reviewed in fluent detail what substitutes for water he would drink in this extremity.
But it wasn’t the old, roaring laugh. There was no need of words between them. Nor did they waste any. The next hope of water was six hours away. A veritable oasis it was. There were trees there and green things.
But six hours away. Six hours of desert travel on tired horses, under the killing, patient sun. And if the second water-hole was dry
There was no choice about it. The grinning, silent desert waited them. The buzzards watched. They were patient, too. Old-time, patient gamblers.
Capitan Vicente started his horse. The others started with slow, laborious steps. Like flies making tentative gestures of walking at the edge of a sheet of sticky fly-paper.
The sun marked the marchers with small dots of shadows.
. . . . . . .
“Kind Mother Nature is a low, practical joker,” El Humoristo muttered in th
e silk neckerchief that he had pulled across the bridge of his nose. All the riders were masked thus. To keep the powdered sand out of their throats and nostrils and lungs. It helped a little.
There was nothing that could keep sand out of the seams of the eyes. It burrowed in at the wrinkles made where a man squints to keep out the glare. It worked like sandpaper. It sawed the wrinkles into raw wounds in which more sand was churned.
The salt of sweat, that dried as quickly as it left the pores, burned in the cuts the sand made. And it ate under the chin straps.
“Steady—got to take it easy,” El Humoristo said to himself. “It’s a long march. But we always come through.”
The legs of the riders hung lifeless and straight. Their shoulders were bent. They had the attitudes of men determined to suffer in silence.
Under the legs of their plodding mounts iridescent lizards streaked. They made tiny lightning flashes. It was impossible to believe that such swift movement could be accomplished by tiny legs.
Horses and riders were coated with dust. It gave them the appearance of equestrian sketches made by a careless sculptor. They rode through a maze of weird plant shapes. The desert vegetation looked like fantastic growths on the bed of the sea. Amazing experiments and discouragements of plants. They were like a disordered procession of cripples marching despondently in search of a healing fountain. Spanish dagger, cactus, century flowers. And never a trace of the cactus species which retains water and which a thirsty man can rob.
“Nature overdoes things,” El Humoristo said to his neckerchief. “Give her a good thing and she does it to death. She is not a precious craftsman. She has deplorably bad taste. No sense of selection, at all.”
He sought to amuse himself. But always at his throat were the slowly closing claws. He’d rather the little column sang. But it was not good for just one man to sing. It might seem too much a boast of strength that would dishearten men already spending the last shred of their own.
No one looked up. The sky was a sheet of molten metal.
“Steady—got to take it easy.”
The floor of the desert began to crawl lazily past. Sometimes it rolled dizzily. And the misshapen plants would start swaying in a lunatic dance.
Always the fog of suffocating dust. The sharp hurt at the seams of the eyes. Swallowing was an effort for which the whole body must be prepared.
El Humoristo slipped a bullet from his cartridge belt. He held this on his tongue. A trick of the old campaigner to fool his tortured palate. It is supposed to give a simulation of water.
Scuff—scuff—scuff—the weary hoofs kicked up more smothering dust. The horses floundered like flies fairly caught on sticky fly-paper. They struggled heroically with each lifting of a leg only to become more deeply mired with the other legs.
The heat put its dry, hot hand over the nostrils and mouth. Again, it sucked the breath away in gasps.
El Humoristo stared at the bobbing head of his horse. It was swelling.. Slowly it grew to a size all out of proportion to its sinewy, slender neck. El Humoristo cried out in horror. The horse’s head shrank to its familiar shape.
“Steady—got to take it easy”—The next time the horse’s had began to swell he smiled quickly and it shrank at once. But it became more and more difficult to be alert with a skeptic smile that would confound this too believable miracle.
The ground began to crawl more frequently. Sometimes a hot wind just ahead of the dying column skimmed up a harried, fleeing troop of apparitions from the sand. And sent it whirling in long, low sweeps into nothing. Or it would build a swift-revolving pillar of sand that reached to heaven itself.
There was a metallic flutter as the lizards glittered underfoot. As if they were mechanical toys wound up by children.
A rattlesnake, disturbed in its sunning, coiled. El Humoristo’s horse was too spent to rear. The rider reached instinctively for his revolver. But his hand dropped again. Death was too close to give it this encouragement
The riders had strung out in a desperate effort to escape the common shroud of dust. But the horses—and men, too—instinctively huddled together again. There was a cold fear of dropping to the last position in the line.
A mutter from the riders. El Humoristo looked up with an effort. Silvano’s horse was down, a prostrate Rosinante. There was no halt in the march. It was the will of the buen Dios. Silvano shouted frantically at his horse. He kicked him. He beat him across the face with his quirt. The horse did not move. Except for one tired shudder of muscles over his whole body.
Silvano cursed. He raised his arms in appeal to the placid, burning sky. He turned to follow the riders. The sand wrapped heavy fingers around his ankles. Once El Humoristo looked back. The buzzards were already at Silvano’s horse. As they hopped clumsily over its body they seemed to be keeping an eye on Silvano. Silvano looked like one of the mad, desert plants. He was moving very slowly. The youngest of the riders began to urge his mount ahead wildly.
The sun spun a glittering curtain before the riders. It retreated as they went painfully on. It undulated with the stirring of a specter wind. The horses stumbled along with gasping, open mouths. The dust settled on their extended tongues.
Scuff—scuff—scuff—all their bodies squirmed into the effort of each step. The head of El Humoristo’s horse had puffed to a great size again. El Humoristo noted this and accepted it.
His body shook each time he tried to swallow. There was a tired ache all over his body. Eyes, nose, legs, head—full of an ache that never could be cured. Every raw sense was twisted and lost in the symphony of exquisite torture.
He was close to the rear of the column. It would be very easy to slip from the saddle—to flatten out against the sand—to grovel in it—and wait a little——
He heard the cheery song of a stream, dancing down a mountain side on its way to the sea. Cold, cold water singing over tiny rocks it washed clean. He stood at the ford and wondered if it was going to rain before he made camp in the cool, friendly forest. There was a pat—pat—pat! Yes, raining already. Well, lots of time. He lifted his face to the tender touch of the rain. He watched the slow, swirling fall of a leaf. It dropped into the merry waters. He watched and wondered if it would be carried into an eddy and trapped or if it would run with the water to the sea. Cold, cold, water—the rain was coming fast now—pat—pat—pat——
El Humoristo jolted back into consciousness. His horse had stumbled. Scuff—scuff—scuff—the mad monotony of the struggling hoofs——
The glare pinched his eyes shut. When he closed them there were roaring flames of red at his eyes. When he forced them open there was a white sheet of flame. His head pulsed in deafening beats. His body throbbed. Every bone jolted in its socket at each step of the stumbling horse. He swayed giddily in the saddle.
He would speak to his horse. Steady! That was it. They always came through——
His mouth fell open foolishly. But there wasn’t any mouth there—just a hot funnel which tried to suck in air but which was choked by hot fumes. The sun dropped blows on his head——
There was a place by the sea. Big, black rocks dripping in the sun. The cool, green waves, laced with veins of white, embraced the rocks and flung wreaths of spray high over them. The sea invited him with its soothing song. The feel of cold water on his body. He stood on the rocks and stripped off his clothes. The cold, wet air stung his naked body—the waves called him—to lie passive and let them carry him out to oblivion—a slow surrender—a quick grip of the tide dragged him under—all his instinct to live was aroused—he fought for breath——
He sobbed as the hot air burned into his lungs. Like the breath of a plumber’s blow-pipe. The dust coated his lolling tongue. His lips were black and swollen and senseless.
It was easier to slip from the saddle and grovel in the sand and wait. It was a good thing that this wasn’t El Humoristo. Caught like a fly on sticky paper and dying miserably. It was somebody else, of course. Somebody else over whose plight El Humorist
o would make jokes some night in camp.
El Humoristo would not die this way. He had been too close to death too many times to die thus miserably and alone. Yes, this was someone else through whose head flashed the red flare of giant, silent cannons——
But, maybe—no, it was someone else. Someone else. It was like this coming out of the ether after an operation—it was like this—the throat——
No, he wouldn’t be caught like a fly on sticky paper. If El Humoristo was to die it would be with a brave gesture. He would gallop ahead, laughing and singing—galloping, laughing and singing into nothing.
He made a tremendous effort to lift the arm on which the loop of his quirt hung. It failed——
Red flames—white flames—thunder throbbing in his body——
The sound of water again. The feel of it against his body, miraculously cold. He tried to lick some water from his shoulder.
He wouldn’t open his eyes this time. There had been the singing mountain stream that disappeared. And the black rocks dripping in the sun——
Cruel hands were tugging at him. They were trying to drag him away from the water. They were calling his name and trying to coax him. He fought savagely.
Capitan Vicente’s face was before him. He looked more than ever like the winking caricature of an owl. Enrique’s face and the face of another. They were laughing hoarsely as they held him——
He was in an oasis. There were trees and green things. The sun was setting in black and gray, crimson and gold. The cool breeze from the hills——
El Humoristo laughed crazily——
. . . . . . .
At the camp fire at the side of the blessed pool El Humoristo learned how his horse had started suddenly for the head of the column. He and his horse had scented the water first. They passed Capitan Vicente and went on. El Humoristo sang all the time in a crazy, cracked voice. The others tried to follow at the same pace, but their horses were not inspired out of their floundering. When they reached the pool they found him lying half-drowned at the edge of the water.
The Little Tigress: Tales out of the Dust of Old Mexico Page 8