by J. M. Hayes
Questas lay in the middle of the floor where his eyes could peer up at J.D. from the depths of his shrouding.
“Do you know this man?” Ortiz asked. His voice was soft and gentle, but the eyes that watched J.D. along the raised, pointing crutch, smoldered with contempt.
“Fitzpatrick,” Questas rasped.
“Tell us what he did there, in the road above Tres Santos.”
“He ran,” Questas answered. “They ambushed us and he broke.” He had to pause and gasp for air between sentences. “Martinez tried to stop him. So did Medina. It got them both killed. Medina knocked him down. But he got up. He ran again. He was shouting and sobbing.”
“No,” J.D. whispered. “It was Medina who ran, not me.” No one heard him. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. They wouldn’t have believed him in the face of Questas’ accusation. He was no longer sure he believed himself.
“I didn’t think he got away,” Questas continued. “But then they shot me and I didn’t see him anymore. I was unconscious. Then they found me with the knife.” His voice was rising. There was madness just behind it.
“You should have come back,” Questas told J.D. “You should have stopped them,” he cried. “You shouldn’t have lived.”
One of the stretcher bearers bent to his side and calmed him. It was a good thing. If he had screamed, J.D. would have joined him. Screamed his way down into some fetid pit inside his soul from which he might never again have emerged. As it was, he stood on its brink and chill terror wafted over him from its maw, paralyzing him.
“No,” Ortiz agreed, looking at J.D. “He shouldn’t have lived. But such errors can be remedied.” He had drawn his knife and he swung slowly toward J.D. Both of them knew what he planned to do with it.
“Stop!” Questas commanded. J.D. wouldn’t have thought the man could be aware of anything but his personal tortures, but the knife had caught his attention, wrenched him back. “No one deserves that,” he said. “I would have run too. If I’d known what they would do to me. You weren’t there. Any man might have broken. Faced with what we met, any of you might have done what he did. Believe me. There is a place inside each of us beyond which we cannot go. Force us there, and we break. We cry, we whimper, we foul ourselves. Above Tres Santos, the lucky ones died before they found that place. Fitzpatrick and I, we found it, we crossed over. Pray, each of you, that you never follow.”
In a way, J.D. knew, Questas was right. Even though it was Medina who broke and ran, and in the confusion of the killing Questas had gotten them confused. Still, in the end, J.D. had broken and run too, with room in his thoughts for only himself. He felt as guilty as Questas believed him.
“I can’t allow this man to live,” Ortiz told Questas.
“It might be kinder if you killed us both,” Questas said. “I’m not sure we can live with what we’ve learned about ourselves. Only do it quickly. Don’t make us face that place again.”
Maybe J.D. should have argued, defended himself. But he didn’t. He believed Questas.
They took J.D. out and led him to a converted storage shed. There were three other men there. He didn’t have to ask. He could see it in their eyes. They, too, were dead men, waiting only on the formality of the rite of passage.
They were kept there through the night and none of them slept. A boy whimpered softly to himself while a bald man knelt in the corner and prayed. Just after dawn the guards came for them. The boy begged and wet himself. The bald man fought them and tried to break free. He had to be dragged along as he cursed them and their wives and mothers and children. J.D. and the fourth wretch followed meekly.
The machine gun was set up in the shade of the east wall of the central plaza. They tied the prisoners along the opposite wall, facing into the angry sun. A small crowd bunched behind the gun, there to witness vengeance or justice, there to seek some clue to the nature of life and death, or there for want of anything better to do at sunrise in Los Gatos.
There were iron rings in the walls to tether draft animals. They worked equally well to secure those condemned to die. J.D. was tied to the ring at the north end of the wall. The boy hung limply from the one beside him and cried for his mother. The belt was in the breach of the machine gun. The gunners lounged behind it and smoked, impatient to finish and get on with the new day.
Ortiz hobbled into the plaza at the head of his lieutenants. In honor of the occasion he wore a pistol buckled on his hip. Otherwise he looked no more military than usual. He appeared a more appropriate figure for sitting in the sun with a tin cup to collect on the guilt of those who thought “better him than me.”
They put blindfolds on the others, but when they began to tie one on J.D., Ortiz forbade it.
“Not that one,” he called. “Let him look death in the face this time.”
The bald man asked for a priest to hear his confession. Los Gatos had none. Ortiz nodded to the gunners and they cocked their weapon. A bird sang in a distant tree and the boy sobbed.
“Start at the south end,” Ortiz told them. “Make Fitzpatrick the last.”
The gun spoke, the gunner sweeping the barrel up and down and his assistant keeping the belt flowing smoothly. Spent brass rained onto the plaza’s dusty surface. The gun traversed each body several times, until what hung from the iron ring was torn and shredded and human no more.
J.D. couldn’t hear the boy over the thunder of the gun, but he felt the splatter of the youth’s blood when he died, and the sting of plaster chips from the wall as the stream of lead flowed nearer. Something slammed his right side, hammer blows so massive and in such close succession he could not distinguish one agony from another. He welcomed the great darkness that swept into his mind.
Her name was Elena. She watched with the silent crowd in the plaza, one of the few with just cause to be there. The boy was her son. J.D. should have died beside him, but she wouldn’t allow it.
The gun jammed. They ran it down his right side, four bullets, four holes, some fractured ribs, some massive tissue damage, a great deal of blood, but, miraculously, nothing damaged that would not heal. They had only fired about a hundred rounds. The gun had spent less than ten seconds at its task. It had not had time to overheat. A ten second burst should not have been too much to ask of it. But it was an old gun. Perhaps the tolerances critical to its function had worn. Perhaps its crew did not understand the need to keep its mechanism cleaner than they kept themselves. The cartridge that housed the round which tore away part of the muscle of J.D.’s thigh lodged in the ejector. It would not clear the way for the one which would have blown away his kneecap. Metal met metal in ways for which the gun was not designed. The thunder stopped and the hail of brass and lead ceased. But the plaza was not silent. It was filled with a distant but growing roar, previously unnoticed over the sound of the gun. Fascist airplanes. Two of them—coming low and fast, to reduce a little more of Los Gatos back to the components from which it had been formed.
The plaza cleared. Executioners and curious alike sought their own safety. They left the jammed gun behind, along with four bodies that hung, bloody ornaments to honor satisfied, upon a sunlit wall.
Her son was dead. J.D. wasn’t. Oblivious to the planes and their bombs which tore at the heart of the village, she cut both of them down, placed them in a hand cart, and wheeled them out through a maelstrom of smoke and dust to the little farm, a few miles down the valley, where she lived.
Ortiz never came looking. J.D. didn’t know whether he died in the bombing or thought the execution satisfactorily completed. By the time J.D. was fit enough to concern himself with such questions, the village was abandoned.
Elena seldom had much to say to him. She never asked who he was nor why he’d been against the wall. The war had taken too much from her—a husband, brothers, and her only son. She would claim whatever flotsam it washed her way, not because she cared for what she saved, but because the act denied the war yet another victory over her.
She nursed and fed him and he healed. Whe
n he was able to leave, she sent him on his way with little care for what would become of him. He was in poor condition by the time he reached Angüés. He had a fever from infection and it passed on into pneumonia. After that there were only bits and pieces, fragments of memory of the time between Angüés and the hospital not far from Baltimore. Death chewed him, then spat him out. He was not yet ripe enough. It would wait and pluck him when he was less ready to die. He slowly regained his health and his strength, but for a long time he woke in the middle of the night with Questas’ screams echoing in his memory, and his own echoing in the dark hospital room.
Business and Pleasure
Mary was so surprised to hear an English profanity on the old Papago’s lips that she looked away from the street to see what was wrong, and when she looked back the light had changed to red. It was late and there was barely any traffic. They got away with running it.
“I beg your pardon?” she said, then remembered to translate the phrase into O’odham.
“I was searching for an expression to voice my reaction to your village,” he told her. “I could not find one in my own tongue, but I remembered yours. Perhaps it is not appropriate. One such as I, who is at war with your people, should be less delighted and more awed, and yet, I am delighted. Have I used the expression incorrectly?”
“No,” Mary admitted. “It, or several variations, cover quite a variety of situations. You just surprised me, that’s all.”
“I have a good memory. It is one of the reasons I am a Siwani Mahkai. Our people do not have many ways to aid their memory. Knowledge is either retained or it is lost.”
She hadn’t paid much attention to their route, just their destination. They’d driven in on Arizona 86, cut north along Mission to Congress, and were entering downtown Tucson.
“You’ve never seen Tucson before, have you?” she asked, suddenly understanding what prompted the exclamation.
“No,” he said. “I have not even been to Sells.”
“You’ve never seen any other American city?”
“There are others? Yes, I suppose there must be, but surely not many are so large.”
“Actually,” she said, “Tucson isn’t large. Only about 40,000 people here. There must be thousands of cities like this in the United States, and lots that are bigger. New York City, for instance, must be two hundred times the size of Tucson.”
He said it again.
“Maybe there’s something I should explain to you about that expression,” she said. It would be a fine thing if it got around that the one useful bit of English he’d picked up from her was its ultimate obscenity. Her reputation for ladylike behavior was on shaky ground in too many quarters already.
J.D. lived on the north side, on East Helen. She went up Stone, took Speedway to Sixth, then turned north for a block and back east again. She glanced at her wrist to check the time but her watch was still in her pack. Unwound for a couple of months, it wouldn’t have been much help. She’d been on Papago time for too long. All the same, she had a pretty good idea what time it was. The sun set about 5:30 in early January. Say about four and a half hours on horseback and then another couple for the drive, maybe a little more because the desert part of the trail was hard to follow in the dark. It was probably between midnight and one.
The lights in J.D.’s house were off but his Ford hugged the curb out front. She pulled up behind it and turned off the ignition. The neighborhood was dark and still.
“Come with me and stay quiet,” she told him.
They went up the front walk across a grassy lawn flanked by a pair of date palms. Jujul looked curious and she could tell he wanted to ask questions, but he was taking her admonition to silence seriously. They weren’t likely to have any problems even if they caught a curious neighbor’s attention, but she didn’t want to try to explain Jujul to one of Tucson’s finest.
J.D.’s was a nice little bungalow on the south side of the street. It had a great view of the Catalinas and a small enough yard to give a bachelor a fighting chance. She and Larry had been there often enough for her to know where the front door was and the general layout inside. Mary tried the handle and it was unlocked. They went in and she closed the door behind them. A bit of light filtered past Venetian blinds and softly striped the living room. She found the sofa.
“Sit here and wait,” she told Jujul. “I want to talk to J.D. first, before he sees you.”
He sat, awkward in such an alien environment. She felt her way through the attached dining room and found the hallway beyond. It was very dark there. She knew which door led to the bathroom. The bedroom must be behind the other. She tried it.
The room was pitch dark, filled with the faint smell of whiskey and the sound of ragged breathing. She felt along the wall and found a switch. She hesitated. What if he wasn’t alone? It couldn’t matter, she realized, except to her. This was far too important to abandon on the possibility of shattered fantasies. She threw the switch.
The light was blinding for a moment, then there was just a bedroom, small, crowded, and a little sloppy. J.D. was sprawled on the bed, arms flung wide, sheets twisted. His face looked troubled and his eyes rolled beneath closed lids. Whatever he was dreaming wasn’t pleasant.
She’d wondered what it would be like to be alone with him in this room for months, but the situation wasn’t quite what she’d imagined and there was important business to attend to. She sat gently on the edge of the bed and reached out to softly stroke his brow. Business could wait a moment.
His eyes flew open. They darted about the room, desperate, haunted, then found her. “Mary!” he gasped, and she was in his arms and his lips were on hers, and she almost forgot the old man in the living room.
The instant he sensed she was trying to disengage herself, he let go. She climbed out of the bed, breathing hard and adjusting her clothes. He looked confused and uncertain, which, under the circumstances, were appropriate reactions.
“I guess that means you’re glad to see me,” she said.
“What? How? Why?” He stammered, sitting up in bed, fighting the sleep and booze that still fogged his mind.
They were good questions, though. Abbreviated as they were, she understood them. What was she doing there? How had she gotten away? And, why had she come to him? She went back over to the bed and took his hand. No reason she couldn’t mix business and pleasure. She answered as best she could. She told him the highlights of her life in Jujul’s camp, what she’d come to think of the old man and his people, how she’d managed to avoid even suspecting until Jujul chose to tell her. The only important things she left out involved her feelings for him and her persisting confusion about them. Just then it would have been too easy to succumb to her fascination, leaving logic and reason to bother her later. And there was that important business they needed to conduct first, sitting, waiting in the front room. She hadn’t told him about that yet either.
“Jujul wants to meet you, J.D.,” she told him. “That’s one of the reasons I’m here. I agreed to arrange it, but I need to be sure you won’t have to arrest him on sight. Can you still meet with him face to face, no strings attached?” It was what she had to know. J.D. might have orders to do just that by now, the sort of orders he couldn’t ignore.
He rubbed at his eyes and put a hand through his sleep tousled hair while she talked, but he didn’t interrupt and it was clear he was listening carefully.
“That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do,” he said. “Larson’s rasing hell and pushing for assault with intent, but my concern with the case is the federal aspect, draft resistance. If Larson’s managed to hammer through an arrest warrant on his charges, I haven’t been advised of it. My instructions are still to try to keep a lid on this, to bring it to a peaceful conclusion. I’d like nothing better than a chance to meet and talk to your friend. And, yes, you have my promise it’ll be without strings. Wherever and whenever Jujul wants, and when we’re done, he can walk away and think about what I’ve said, talk to his people
. Whatever he needs to do. OK?”
“OK,” she agreed. She got off the bed and dragged at his hand. “Come on, he’s waiting in your living room.”
“Living room?” he asked, as if trying to recall what part of the Southern Arizona desert that might be in.
“Living room,” she repeated with a big smile. “You know, through that door and toward the front of the house.”
“Living room,” he said again, understanding this time. “You are one remarkable lady, you know that?”
She liked it better than being the idiot who had lived in Jujul’s village for a month and a half without the glimmer of an idea as to where she was. “Come on,” she said, and tugged again, and discovered why he hadn’t been following her.
“Sorry,” he said, pulling the sheet back up over his waist. “No clean pajamas.”
She blushed. Ruth and Maggie had been right about the scars. There was a fourth one where it would be hidden by a bathing suit.
“Maybe I should go wait with your visitor,” Mary suggested.
“Suit yourself,” he said, grinning at her embarrassment. “I’ve got nothing left to hide.”
She picked up a pair of slacks from where he’d left them hanging over the back of a chair and tossed them on the bed.
“Put your pants on,” she commanded, “and come greet your guest. We’ll play later.” She was out the door before she realized what she’d said. Apparently she’d just committed herself to cheating on her husband. So much for logic and reason. She would have turned right around and gone back and made good on it if Jujul hadn’t been waiting.
To Surrender
They had learned respect for each other during their protracted and deadly serious game of hide and seek. That respect carried them beyond their initial reaction to each other’s alienness. They both spoke some Spanish, but Mary’s ability to translate to each man’s native language soon had them exchanging information and opinions with surprising comfort.