Back at the house I told Mrs. Carranza I had to quit, and would get a new boy for her. Then Harris and me had a steak and put ourselves outside of a bottle of sherry, while he filled me in on the details of the operation. He’d put considerable money into buying discretion from a dockmaster and a Brit packet captain. This packet was about the only boat that put into Tampico from New Orleans on anything like a regular basis, and Harris had the idea that smuggling guns wasn’t too much of a novelty to the captain. The next Friday night we were going to load the stuff onto the packet, bound south the next morning.
The loading went smooth as cream, and the next day we boarded the boat as paying passengers, Washington supposedly belonging to Harris and coming along as his manservant. At first it was right pleasant, slipping through a hundred or so miles of bayou country. But the Gulf of Mexico ain’t the Mississippi, and after a couple of hours of that I was sick from my teeth to my toenails, and stayed that way for days. Captain gave me a mixture of brandy and seawater, which like to killed me. Harris thought that was funny, but the humor wore off when we put into Tampico and him and Washington had to offload the car without much help from me.
We went on up to Parrodi’s villa and found we might be out of a job. While we were on that boat there had been a revolution. Santa Anna got kicked out, having pretty much emptied the treasury, and now the moderado Herrera was in charge. Parrodi and Harris argued for a long time. The Mexican was willing to pay for the rifles, but he figured that half the money was for our service as spies.
They finally settled on eight thousand, but only if we would stay in Tampico for the next eighteen months, in case a war did start. Washington and I would get fifty dollars a month for walking around money.
The next year was the most boring year of my life. After New Orleans, there’s just not much you could say about Tampico. It’s an old city but also brand-new. Pirates burnt it to the ground a couple of hundred years ago. Santa Anna had it rebuilt in the twenties, and it was still not much more than a garrison town when we were there. Most of the houses were wood, imported from the States and nailed together. Couple of whorehouses and cantinas downtown, and you can bet I spent a lot of time and fifty bucks a month down there.
Elsewhere, things started to happen in the spring. The U.S. Congress went along with Polk and voted to annex Texas, and Mexico broke off diplomatic relations, and declared war, but Washington didn’t seem to notice. Herrera must have had his hands full with the Carmelite Revolution, though things were quiet in Tampico for the rest of the year.
I got to know Harris pretty well. He spent a lot of time teaching me to read and write Spanish—though I never could talk it without sounding like a gringo—and I can tell you he was hellfire as a teacher. The teachers used to whip me when I was a kid, but that was easier to take than Harris’s tongue. He could make you feel about six inches tall. Then a few minutes later you get a verb right and you’re a hero.
We’d also go into the woods outside of town and practice with the pistol and rifle. He could so some awesome things with a Colt. He taught me how to throw a knife and I taught him how to use a lasso.
We got into a kind of routine. I had a room with the Galvez family downtown. I’d get up pretty late mornings and peg away at my Spanish books. About midday Harris would come down (he was staying up at the general’s place) and give me my daily dose of sarcasm. Then we’d go down to a cantina and have lunch, usually with Washington. Afternoons, when most of the town napped, we might go riding or shooting in the woods south of town. We kept the Galvez family in meat that way, getting a boar or a deer every now and then. Since I was once a farm boy I knew how to dress out animals and how to smoke or salt meat to keep it. Señora Galvez always deducted the value of the meat from my rent.
Harris spent most evenings up at the villa with the officers, but sometimes he’d come down to the cantinas with me and drink pulque with the off-duty soldiers, or sometimes just sit around the kitchen table with the Galvez family. They took a shine to him.
He was really taken with old Doña Dolores, who claimed to be over a hundred years old and from Spain. She wasn’t a relative but had been a friend of Señora Galvez’s grandmother. Anyhow, she also claimed to be witch, a white witch who could heal and predict things and so forth.
If Harris had a weakness it was superstition. He always wore a lucky gold piece on a thong around his neck and carried an Indian finger bone in his pocket. And though he could swear the bark off a tree, he never used the names of God or Jesus, and when somebody else did he always crossed the fingers of his left hand. Even so, he laughed at religion and I never saw him go to church. So he was always asking Dolores about this or that, and always ready to listen to her stories. She only had a couple of dozen, but they kept changing.
Now I never thought that Dolores wasn’t straight. If she wasn’t a witch she sure as hell thought she was. And she did heal, with her hands and with herbs she picked in the woods. She healed me of the grippe and a rash I picked up from one of the girls. But I didn’t believe in spells or fortune-telling, not then. When anybody’s eighteen he’s a smart aleck and knows just how the world works. I’m not so sure anymore, especially with what happened to Harris.
Every week or so we got a newspaper from Monterrey. By January I could read it pretty well, and looking back I guess you could say it was that month the war really started, though it would be spring before any shots were fired. What happened was that Polk sent some four thousand troops into what he claimed was part of Texas. The general was Zach Taylor, who was going to be such a crackerjack president a few years later. Herrera seemed about to make a deal with the States, so he got booted out and they put Paredes in office. The Mexicans started building up an army in Monterrey, and it looked like we were going to earn money after all.
I was starting to get a little nervous. You didn’t have to look too hard at the map to see that Tampico was going to get trouble. If the U.S. wanted to take Mexico City they had the choice of marching over a couple thousand miles of mountain and desert, or taking a Gulf port and only marching a couple hundred miles. Tampico and Vera Cruz were about the same distance from Mexico City, but Vera Cruz had a fort protecting it. All we had was us.
Since our Civil War nobody remembers much about the Mexican one. Well, the Mexicans were in such bad shape even Taylor could beat them. The country was flat broke. Their regular army had more officers than men. They drafted illiterate Indians and mestizos and herded them by the thousands into certain death from American artillery and cavalry—some of them had never even fired a shot before they got into battle. That was Santa Anna economizing. He would’ve lost that war even if Mexico had all the armies of Europe combined.
Now we thought we’d heard the last of that one-legged son of a bitch. When we got to Tampico he’d just barely got out of Mexico with his skin, exiled to Cuba. But he got back, and he damn near killed me and Harris with his stupidity. And he did kill Washington, just as sure as if he pulled the trigger.
In May of that year Taylor had a showdown up by Matamoros, and Polk got around to declaring war. We started seeing American boats all the time, going back and forth out of cannon range, blockading the port. It was nervous making. The soldiers were fit to be tied—but old Dolores said there was nothing to worry about. Said she’d be able to “see” if there was going to be fighting, and she didn’t see anything. This gave Harris considerable more comfort than it gave me.
What we didn’t find out until after the war was that Santa Anna got in touch with the United States and said he could get Mexico to end the war, give up Texas and California, and for all I know the moon. Polk, who must have been one fine judge of character, gave Santa Anna safe passage through the American blockade.
Well, in the meantime the people in Mexico had gotten a belly full of Paredes, who had a way of having people he disagreed with shot, and they kicked him out. Santa Anna limped in and they made him president. He double-crossed Polk, got together twenty thousand soldiers, and
got ready to head north and kick the stuffing out of the gringos.
Now you figure this one out. The Mexicans intercepted a message to the American naval commander, telling him to take Tampico. What did Santa Anna do? He ordered Parrodi to desert the place.
I was all for the idea myself, and so were a lot of the soldiers, but the general was considerable upset. It was bad enough that he couldn’t stand and fight, but on top of that he didn’t have near enough mules and horses to move out all the supplies they had stockpiled there.
Well, we sure as hell were going to take care of our supplies. Harris had a buckboard and we’d put a false bottom under the seat. Put our money in there and the papers that identified us as loyal Americans. In another place we put our Mexican citizenship papers and the deeds to our land grant, up in the Mesilla Valley. Then we drew weapons from the armory and got ready to go up to San Luis Potosi with a detachment that was leaving in the morning.
I was glad we wouldn’t be in Tampico when the American fleet rolled in, but then San Luis Potosi didn’t sound like any picnic, either. Santa Anna was going to be getting his army together, and it was only a few hundred miles from Taylor’s army. One or the other of them would probably want to do something with all those soldiers.
Harris was jumpy. He kept putting his hand in his pocket to rub that Indian bone. That night, before he went up to the villa, he came to the hacienda with me, and told Dolores he’s had a bad premonition about going to San Luis Potosi. He asked her to tell his fortune and tell him flat out if he was going to die. She said she couldn’t tell a man when he was going to die, even when she saw it. If she did her powers would go away. But she would tell his fortune.
She studied his hands for a long time without saying anything. Then she took out a shabby deck of cards and dealt some out in front of him, face up. (They weren’t regular cards. They had faded pictures of devils and skeletons and so forth.)
Finally she told him not to worry. He was not going to die in San Luis. In fact, he wouldn’t die in Mexico at all. That was plain.
Now I wish that I had Harris’s talent for shucking off worries. He laughed and gave her a gold real, and then he dragged me down to the cantina, where we proceeded to get more than half corned on that damned pulque, on his money. We carried out four big jars of the stuff, which was a good thing. I had to drink half one in the morning before I could see through the agony. That stuff is not good for white men. Ten cents a jug, though.
The trek from Tampico to San Luis took more than a week, with Washington riding in the back of the buckboard and Harris and me taking turns riding and walking. There was about two hundred soldiers in our group, no more used to walking than us, and sometimes they eyed that buckboard. It was hilly country and mostly dry. General Parrodi went on ahead and we never saw him again. Later on we learned that Santa Anna court-martialed him for desertion, for letting the gringos take Tampico. Fits.
San Luis Potosi looked like a nice little town, but we didn’t see too damned much of it. We went to the big camp outside of town. Couldn’t find Parrodi, so Harris sniffed around and got us attached to General Pacheco’s division. General looked at the contract and more or less told us to pitch a tent and stay out of the way.
You never seen so many greasers in your life. Four thousand who Taylor’d kicked out of Monterrey, and about twenty thousand more who might or might not have known which end the bullet comes out of.
We got a good taste of what they call santanismo now. Santa Anna had all these raw boys, and what did he do to get them in shape for a fight? He had them dress up and do parades, while he rode back and forth on his goddamned horse. Week after week. A lot of the boys ran away, and I can’t say I blame them. They didn’t have a thousand dollars and a ranch to hang around for.
We weren’t the only Americans there. A whole bunch of Taylor’s men, more than two hundred, had absquatulated before he took Monterrey. The Mexicans gave them land grants, too. They were called the “San Pats,” the San Patricio battalion. We were told not to go near them, so that none of them would know we weren’t actually prisoners.
After a couple of months of this, we found out what the deal was going to be. Taylor’d had most of his men taken away from him, sent down to Tampico to join up with another bunch that was headed for Mexico City. What Santa Anna said we were going to do was go north and wipe out Taylor, then come back and defend the city. The first part did look possible, since we had four or five men for every one of Taylor’s. Me and Harris and Washington decided we’d wait and see how the first battle went. We might want to keep going north.
It took three days to get all the men on the road. Not just men, either; a lot of them had their wives and children along, carrying food and water and firewood. It was going to be three hundred miles, most of it barren. We saw Santa Anna go by, in a carriage drawn by eight white mules, followed by a couple carriages of whores. If I had the second sight Dolores claimed to have, I might’ve spent a pill on that son of a bitch. I still wonder why nobody ever did.
It wasn’t easy even for us, with plenty of water and food. Then the twelfth day a norther came in, the temperature dropped way below freezing, and a goddamned blizzard came up. We started passing dead people by the side of the road. Then Washington lost his voice, coughed blood for a while, and died. We carried him till night and then buried him. Had to get a pick from the engineers to get through the frozen ground. I never cried over a nigger before or since. Nor a white man, now I think of it. Could be it was the wind. Harris and me split his share of the gold and burnt his papers.
It warmed up enough for the snow to turn to cold drizzle, and it rained for two days straight. Then it stopped and the desert sucked up the water, and we marched the rest of the way through dust and heat. Probably a fourth of Santa Anna’s men died or deserted before we got to where Zach Taylor was waiting, outside of Saltillo in a gulch called Buena Vista. Still, we had them so outnumbered we should’ve run them into the ground. Instead, Santa Anna spent the first whole day fiddling, shuffling troops around. He didn’t even do that right. Any shavetail would’ve outflanked and surrounded Taylor’s men. He left all their right flank open, as well as the road to Saltillo. I heard a little shooting but nothing much happened.
It turned cold and windy that night. Seemed like I just got to sleep when drums woke me up—American drums, sounding reveille, that’s how close we were. Then a goddamned band, playing “Hail Columbia.” Both Taylor and Santa Anna belonged on a goddamned parade ground.
A private came around with chains and leg-irons, said he was supposed to lock us to the buckboard. For twenty dollars he accidentally dropped the key. I wonder if he ever lived to spend it. It was going to be a bad bloody day for the Mexicans.
We settled in behind the buckboard and watched about a thousand cavalrymen charge by, lances and machetes and blood in their eye, going around behind the hills to our right. Then the shooting started, and it didn’t let up for a long time.
To our left, they ordered General Blanco’s division to march into the gulch column-style, where the Americans were set up with field artillery. Cannister and grapeshot cut them to bloody rags. Then Santa Anna rode over and ordered Pacheco’s division to go for the gulch. I was as glad to be chained to a buckboard. They walked right into it, balls but no brains, and I guess maybe half of them eventually made it back. Said they’d killed a lot of gringos, but I didn’t notice it getting any quieter.
I watched all this from well behind the buckboard. Every now and then a stray bullet would spray up dirt or plow into the wood. Harris just stood out in the open, as far from cover as the chain would let him, standing there with his hands in his pockets. A bullet or a piece of grape knocked off his hat. He dusted it off and wiggled his finger at me through the hole, put it back on his head and put his hands back in his pockets. I reminded him that if he got killed I’d take all the gold. He just smiled. He was absolutely not going to die in Mexico. I told him even if I believed in that bunkman I’d want to give
it a little help. A goddamned cannonball whooshed by and he didn’t blink, just kept smiling. It exploded some ways behind us, and I got a little piece in the part that goes over the fence last, which isn’t funny as it might sound, since it was going to be a month before I could sit proper.
Harris did leave off being a target long enough to do some doctoring on me. While he was doing that a whole bunch of troops went by behind us, following the way the cavalry went earlier, and they had some nice comments for me. I even got to show my bare butt to Santa Anna, which I guess not too many people do and live.
We heard a lot of noise from their direction but couldn’t see anything because of the hills. We also stopped getting shot at, which was all right by me, though Harris seemed bored.
Since then I’ve read everything I could get my hands on about that battle. The Mexicans had fifteen hundred to two thousand men killed and wounded at Buena Vista, thanks to Santa Anna’s generaling. The Americans were unprepared and outnumbered, and some of them actually broke and ran—where even the American accounts admit that the greasers were all-fired brave. If we’d had a real general, a real battle plan, we would’ve walked right over the gringos.
And you can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened. What if Zach Taylor’d been killed, or even just lost the battle? Who would the Whigs have run for president, who would have been elected? Maybe somebody who didn’t want a War Between the States.
Anyhow, the noise died down and the soldiers straggled back. It’s a funny thing about soldiering. After all the bloody fighting, once it was clear who had won, the Americans came out on the battlefield and shared their food and water with us, and gave some medical help. But that night was terrible with the sounds of the dying, and the retreat was pure hell. I was for heading north, forget the land grant, but of course Harris knew that he was going to make it through no matter what.
Year's Best Science Fiction 01 # 1984 Page 26