Halfway to El Paso, they passed a Butterfield stagecoach going in the opposite direction, filled with mail and passengers. As Bowman watched it speed past, he thought that if he threw a letter inside it, it might reach Reunion before Alexandra Desmond could leave.
El Paso was as big as Fort Worth, the size of an English hamlet. Before entering it, Bowman stopped near the river on whose banks the town was built. The famous Rio Grande that the Paterson men all talked about – the border with that unknown land of Mexico – was as wide as the Thames, as powerful as the Irrawaddy, and as muddy as the Ganges. On the other shore, more spread out and populous than El Paso, he saw a white town with the figures of people in it, and a small crenellated fort, on the water’s edge, facing the American town. Walden plunged his head into the river and Bowman, sitting next to the horse, finished a bottle of whiskey. He had not drunk so much in a long time and he felt nauseous.
In town, he asked the way to Fort Bliss, leaning down from his horse towards the citizens he questioned. There were other sorts of Mexicans in the streets, men with long black hair, wrapped up in blankets, walking in twos, sitting in the dust outside saloons. Maybe they were Indians, even if they didn’t correspond to the idea he had of them: savage warriors running all day long under a hot sun, the fleet-footed hunters described by Irving, or the colourful horsemen that Cooper wrote about. As in the streets of Reunion, Walden snorted hard as they passed through El Paso, confirming Bowman’s impression that this place stank.
Unlike Fort Worth or Fort Smith, Fort Bliss was not a town that had taken the name of a military camp: it was actually the headquarters of the Eighth Infantry Division, one mile north of El Paso. Bowman came to a halt two hundred yards from the stone fortifications and observed the patrols of horsemen, the columns of soldiers coming and going through the wide gates in their blue uniforms, just like the ones the soldiers in New York had worn. He took out his second bottle and finished it while observing the incessant to-and-fro of the troops. Sentries on passageways watched him approach, and two guards at the entrance to the fort ordered him to stop.
“What do you want?”
Bowman was drunk. He looked down on them from his nervous horse. His lips stuck together and his words got mixed up in his mouth. Seeing that the soldiers were young and lacking in confidence, he spoke to them tersely:
“I have to see the commander.”
“The commander? Who are you?”
The two soldiers glanced at each other.
“He’s completely plastered.”
“What do you want with the commander?”
“I have to talk to someone.”
“Civilians can’t just enter the fort like that. You need an authorisation or a good reason.”
Walden stamped his hooves and Bowman let him.
“Let me pass.”
“What did you say?”
Walden moved towards them, shaking his head. The two youths stepped back and grabbed their rifles. A sentry aimed at him from his post. Bowman spoke loudly:
“I have to see the commander, about the man who got chopped up.”
Walden whinnied and moved further forward.
“Halt!”
The other young soldier called out:
“Corporal! There’s a problem at the gate!”
*
He was shoved in a cell, a small building next to the officers’ quarters. Through an arrow slit, he saw his horse, tied up, kicking with all its strength until the load it had been carrying was scattered all over the courtyard of the fort. No-one could calm it down, and Bowman watched while waiting for someone to fetch him. He smiled as he saw the soldiers and the officers in their usual agitation, stiff-backed and close-shaved, their weapons polished and their uniforms worn with pride. By the time a sergeant told him to leave his cell, his nausea had diminished, as had his desire to see Walden crush the soldiers under his hooves. He was led to an office belonging to a young captain with a moustache, whose nose wrinkled as soon as he entered.
“Guard, leave us. Sit down, please.”
Bowman sat on a chair.
“Could you give me some water?”
The officer poured him a glass from the pitcher on his desk. Bowman drank it and handed back the empty glass. The captain poured him some more.
“Thank you.”
“So you do have manners, despite the way you arrived at the fort.”
“I’d been drinking.”
“Your body odour is rather strong, sir, but it’s true that I can still smell the alcohol on you. Are you in a fit state to tell me what you are doing here?”
“Sergeant Arthur Bowman, East India Company. British.”
“Your accent testifies as much, Sergeant. But not your uniform.”
“I’m not a soldier any more.”
The captain smiled.
“I guessed that much. What are you doing in America, Mr Bowman, and more particularly at Fort Bliss?”
Bowman would have really liked to drink a bit more water.
“In Dallas, I heard talk of a murder here, something horrible. I wanted to find out if there was a connection with what happened back in London, several months ago. Another murder.”
The captain’s expression was strange: a mixture of disgust and fear. He was one of the few – along with young Slim, the cops in Wapping, Mrs Desmond and old Brewster – who had seen it. The two men exchanged a look, then the captain poured himself a glass of water.
“Why are you interested in that case?”
Bowman scratched his beard with his three fingers.
“The victim in Dallas, Richard Kramer, was a friend.”
The officer made a suitable face and offered his condolences.
“This country is still badly organised, so it is the army that has the task of investigating and judging. Too many people think they can mete out justice themselves. Is that why you came to Fort Bliss?”
“Whether you or I do it makes no difference.”
“And if you did it, I don’t suppose any judge would send you to prison. But that’s not the point. Anyway, you were wrongly informed, Mr Bowman. The case you’ve heard about did not occur here but in Las Cruces, about fifty miles north of here.”
Bowman smiled.
“I was part of an army that meted out justice too. It did such a good job of it that it ended up with an entire country on its back.”
“So you understand what I’m saying.”
“No, it’s you that does not understand.”
In the fort’s courtyard, Walden was still whinnying fiercely. Bowman looked out of the window.
“In the Company’s army, I was the executioner. I’m not sure I would do it again.”
The captain smoothed down his long moustache and observed Bowman for a moment. Then he opened a drawer of his desk and took out a leather briefcase, from which he drew two sheets of paper.
“Mr Bowman, I have no reason to provide you with this information. If I do so, it’s because I believe there is no connection between these two cases. On the other hand, if you have any information that might aid us, please let me know. From one soldier to another. And I hope that, after that, you will calmly make your way home.”
Bowman nodded.
“I hope so too.”
Captain Phillips read out the investigation report. During those ten minutes, Bowman did all he could to memorise the facts – date, place, witness, identity of the victim – while waiting for the most important one: the description of the corpse. When Captain Phillips had finished reading, he was pale. The pitcher rattled against the glass when he poured himself more water.
“Given the conditions of the death, we concluded that it was an Indian ritual. I fought against the Comanches and the Apaches, and what I saw in Las Cruces . . . No-one else is capable of that. So, is there a link with your friend’s death?”
Bowman thought for a moment.
“None at all.”
The captain stood up.
“I suspected
as much. And I think it’s better this way. As for you, Mr Bowman, go back to Dallas and get on with your life.”
Bowman stood in turn, dizzy from the alcohol he had drunk and the words he’d just heard. The captain accompanied him to the door and shook his hand.
“Go home, Mr Bowman.”
Bowman tried to smile and looked outside, where his horse was still terrorising the fort.
“I don’t think Walden likes this place. And I’m not going to be able to change his mind.”
A guard gave him his belongings and he went outside to untie the mustang, which finally stopped bellowing. When Bowman sat in the saddle, he held his legs tight around the horse’s body, well aware of what was about to happen. Walden charged through the fort’s wide gates, with one final whinny.
He headed towards El Paso until he was out of sight of Fort Bliss, then turned back. Circling around the camp, he went north until he was back on the track to Santa Fe. About fifteen miles north of Fort Bliss, the road forked. A sign indicated New Mexico and Santa Fe to the north, and another, perpendicular, announced simply: West. Bowman continued northward. He spent the night in a rocky shelter in this half-desert landscape, leaving Walden untethered so he could wander off and find some dry bushes to feed on.
Bowman found only a few branches to burn. He was out of alcohol and the night was freezing cold. His clothes and blanket were not enough to protect him. Woken by a coughing fit, he discovered that he was feverish. Hands trembling, he drank a mouthful of Brewster’s decoction, then he took out his papers and his pen and hastened to write down everything he remembered.
I found their scent again at Fort Bliss. They were at Las Cruces a month ago and the soldiers think it was the Indians who did that but it’s them. The dead man’s name was Amadeus Richter and he was a travelling salesman who worked between Mexico and the United States and also with the Comancheros – white men who trade with the Comanche Indians. It was the people in the village who found him one morning in a barn and they only recognised him because of his things. Nobody saw anything and as he thinks it was the Indians Captain Phillips has not even asked if Richter was with any white people before being killed or if there were any white strangers in Las Cruces. I’m going there to ask the questions he didn’t ask.
Bowman did not open his block of letter paper. Instead of continuing his letter to Mrs Desmond, he simply wrote to her on the same page.
The captain told me I should go home and if I had a home where you are now, I think I would go there. I’ve been in the same places as them and now I am only one and a half months behind them.
Brewster’s potion was having an effect now. Bowman felt floaty and kept writing anything that came into his head.
I don’t feel good and when I got to Fort Bliss I thought I was going to have a fit. I don’t know if you will be pleased but when I crossed the mines in Guadalupe I thought about what you said. About what I should hope for and what is more important than the things I imagined. It made me think of something I heard from Peavish, the preacher I’m looking for. He said we keep only what we give to others. He said that to the men in the Company who gave others death.
*
By the time he entered Las Cruces, the effects of the potion had mostly passed and his fever was reduced. The town resembled the one he’d seen on the other side of the Rio Grande. Wattle-and-daub buildings with rounded corners, earth-coloured or painted white, were stuck to each other in a way that seemed prettier than the Americans’ wooden constructions. Unlike Fort Worth or Dallas, the streets of Las Cruces were sheltered from the wind. In place of a central building like the one created by the dreamers of Reunion, the heart of the town was a paved square surrounded by shops. The inn where he asked for food – for himself and his horse – had a Mexican name: Cantina de la Plaza. The customers, too, were Mexican, and for the first time since his arrival in New York, Arthur Bowman had the impression of being in a foreign country; for the first time in even longer, he was the only white in a crowd of natives – men who looked like the miners he had seen in the Guadalupe Mountains: stocky, dark-skinned and black-haired.
Bowman paid for his meal, leaving a good tip for the landlord, and asked if he knew where the white man had been killed the previous month. The man recoiled and began stammering rapidly in Spanish while crossing himself several times, his hand making uninterrupted circles from his forehead to his chest.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying. The barn – where is the barn?”
“Burned, señor. Someone burned it down. All that’s left is the gravestone in the cemetery. Nothing else, señor.”
Bowman walked up to the hill that was scattered with gravestones, all of them as white as the town. Floral tributes to the Virgin Mary, candles and pieces of pottery decorated the monuments that lay under the sun, unprotected by any wall. Out of breath from the climb, Bowman crouched in the shade of a vault and took off his hat. At the far end of the cemetery, a group of graves without crosses caught his eye. They were just planks stuck in the earth, some of them anonymous. Bowman examined them until he found the one belonging to Amadeus Richter, the most recent of the banished tombstones. Someone had at least taken the time to write his name. Bowman did not stay long to meditate over this mound of earth. The grave told him nothing about Richter’s murderer, and he was not very interested in the idea that he, too, might end up with a plank over his head, without anyone to write his name on it.
He walked back down to the town and ordered a drink at the cantina. The landlord put a bottle of perfectly clear alcohol on the table. The bottle had no label. Bowman tasted the tequila and did not let go of the bottle until he had finished it.
When he woke up, he was lying on a pile of straw, his boots in a trough where Walden was placidly chewing hay and staring at him. He filled his buckets with water and his saddlebags with flour, lard and a few vegetables, and spent forty cents on two bottles of that Mexican alcohol. A shopkeeper recommended the fruit of a cactus, which, he said, helped against thirst, hunger and hangovers, and – if necessary, señor – gave you back your strength and vigour in bed. Prickly pears, identical to the ones Bowman had eaten in Africa. The Mohammedans, on the other side of the Atlantic, also claimed that these fruits gave a man the strength to walk a dozen miles without drinking water but that no well-made man needed them to honour a woman. Everything that the desert produced was a gift from God capable of curing death. Bowman bought a pound of them.
7
The track to Santa Fe was the path of gold. Colorado – the place dreamed of by the employees on the Paterson ranch – was now four hundred miles ahead of him. The next towns on his route were Albuquerque and Rio Rancho, a five-day ride away, before Santa Fe and the New Mexican border. Between Las Cruces and Albuquerque, the path crossed the Chihuahuan Desert, two high plateaus divided by the Rio Grande valley. The inns no longer belonged to Butterfield, but to the American Express Company. Bowman continued to stop at them for as short a time as possible and, when he could, crossed the Rio Grande to ride along the bank opposite that of the main track, which was frequented by stagecoaches and convoys of carriages. The traffic on the track grew ever busier. Traders or migrants, almost everyone was headed north, and in the inns, one name was on everyone’s lips: Pikes Peak.
Bowman’s hunting expeditions did not go well and he had to buy most of his food at the inns, along with his alcohol. He was no longer able to fall asleep or get up without a sufficient dose. When he had no alcohol, he drank some of old Brewster’s potion.
After six days, he came within sight of Albuquerque and decided to spend the night by a river before going into town. He lit a fire and cooked his last ration of flour. Leaning against the fallen trunk of a dead tree, his rifle beside him and a bottle in his hand, he watched the traffic on the other shore: covered wagons pulled by cattle, tired women and children, men walking next to their animals to keep up their pace. The convoys, whether they had left as a group or come together by chance, often numbered two,
three or four loaded carriages. Furniture, tools and barrels, with a cow or a workhorse tied behind them, they all looked the same, from the goods to their owners. While their slow, painful progress made Bowman smile as he sipped his whiskey, their grim determination to reach their goals made him lower his head. He uncorked the little bottle of potion. Walden pricked up his ears and snorted. Bowman glanced over the trunk, grabbed his rifle and tried to aim it despite the numbing effects of Brewster’s plants. On the shore where he had taken refuge, coming from the north, a cart drawn by a mule had stopped about thirty feet away. A tall, skinny man in a black suit, a bowler hat on his head, raised his hand in greeting.
“Good evening!”
He had a strange accent. The man looked around him, at the river and the trees, the nook where Bowman had lit his fire.
“I have a few things to eat. And some fresh coffee.”
He was smiling and unarmed. Bowman signalled him to approach. The mule advanced a few steps and stopped in front of the camp. The man got down from the cart. He was about fifty years old, with a greying beard on his chin and a face as long as his arm. He unloaded a wooden crate, which he put down near the fire. The first thing he took out of it was a jug of hooch.
“We don’t have to eat right away. The weather will be fine tonight.”
He raised his bottle and Bowman, still in a haze, did the same.
“Vladislav Brezisky. American for five years. I’m seeking my fortune around these parts. I’ll return your hospitality one of these days, in a big house or maybe even in a town I’ve built myself. In the meantime, I make good coffee, and if you have any aches or pains, I can look after you, because I’m a doctor. I can’t do anything against alcohol, though. I have too much respect for that passion. What are you looking for, my friend? Gold or oblivion?”
Walden snorted and stamped. Brezisky looked at the mustang.
Retribution Road Page 31