Teresa

by Les Savage, Jr.

“Hilario, why do we have to quarrel? You’ve been gone weeks. We can’t fight the minute you get back.”

  “It’s the whole thing, Teresa. Something’s changed. I used to think Amado was the right man for our country. I thought you were right to support him. Now I don’t know.” He shook his head helplessly. “If only you didn’t have to be mixed up in it.”

  “You know why I do it, Hilario.”

  “You wouldn’t have to if—” He stopped, lips parted.

  “If what?”

  He looked at her a moment, the flesh shining on his sharp cheekbones. He was breathing heavier and it came from him abruptly, blurted out. “If you had a husband.”

  She smiled. She didn’t know whether to make it facetious, or to treat it seriously. For the first time, with him, she didn’t know what to say. He saw it, and leaned toward her, face taut with excitement and tension. The words came from him in a rush, breathless and barely coherent.

  “Been offered a transfer, Teresa…Mexico City. You’d never have to be afraid again. Most beautiful city in the world. Never have to play politics. A baile every night. My family place. A castle. Live like a queen, Teresa. You have no conception.”

  He broke off, breathing heavily, something almost startled in his face, as if just realizing what he’d said. Her eyes were shadowed, sober.

  “I always wondered about you, Hilario.”

  He came to her, took her hands in his. She could feel the tremor run through him. “It wouldn’t be different as my wife. You’d have the same devotion. Only it would be a million times greater. Believe me, Teresa.”

  She wanted to cry. She freed her hands, turning from him, pacing to the table. She wanted to cry and she wanted to laugh. It was so ironic, so bitterly ironic. What he was offering was beautiful and sincere and honest. Yet all of it was like ashes in her mouth.

  “I would be betraying you, Hilario. I’ve done that in a hundred little ways, before. But I couldn’t do it this way.”

  His steps sounded dragging as they came up behind her. His voice trembled a little. “You couldn’t learn to love me?”

  She looked around the room. She had created a world of her own here—no matter what the price—had found a fierce sort of individuality. She could not sacrifice that. She could not gamble with her emotions again. She remembered the last time she had married without love—the pain it had brought, the misery. And this time the pain would be Hilario’s too. She could not do it to him.

  “Hilario…I’ll always think of you as the best friend I ever had. Someone so wonderful happens to a woman only once in her life.”

  It was a long time before he answered. His voice sounded heavy, tired. “Perhaps I knew it would be that way. Perhaps it’s why I never spoke before.”

  His saber tinkled softly as he turned and went to the door. Without turning, she said, “I’ll miss you.”

  He opened the door. “I’m not going to Mexico City.”

  * * * *

  She followed him out in a few moments. She reached the main sala in time to see his slim swordsman’s figure go out the door. She walked through the gathering evening crowd. The Navajo doorman held the portal open for her and she watched Perea go down San Francisco Street toward the plaza. He passed Burro Alley. In a moment a man stepped from the dark shadows of the alley. Teresa recognized the tall, lean figure of Vic Jares. He followed Perea toward the crowded plaza, idly cutting a chaw from his plug tobacco.

  A dark apprehension ran through Teresa. She realized she had not gotten Perea’s promise to stop snooping. And she remembered Ryker’s warning.

  Teresa walked moodily back into the gambling hall. She had come out here mainly to check things, as was her habit at the beginning of an evening. But she was too worried about Perea to concentrate on the tables. As she walked through the thin crowd, acknowledging greetings with a nod, one of her lookouts moved in beside her.

  “Escudero asks for credit again,” he said.

  “Give it to him.”

  “But he can sign nothing for it. You have the deed to his house.”

  “He’s Biscara’s man in the Assembly, isn’t he?” she asked. Her green eyes turned smoky. “The deeper in debt he gets the more power we have over him. Remember that, Pio.”

  He shook his head and went back to his high stool. As she passed through the room, she saw Kelly Morgan standing at the bar. He had been hidden by the crowd when she followed Perea out.

  It was the first time she’d seen him since the spring of 1838—over a year ago—when he’d come to her sala to take the money from Ryker at the point of a knife. She knew Kelly had spent the winter in Taos, waiting to see if Ryker would press the charges in Santa Fe. This spring he’d probably been up in the mountains, working the traplines till the beaver began to molt. Most of the trappers returned to Taos or Santa Fe during the summer, waiting till fall when the furs would become prime again. Kelly leaned with his back against the bar, elbows hooked over it, an indolent grin etching a million fine lines in his mahogany-burnt face.

  “Maybe I can buy you a drink,” he said.

  For a moment she was reluctant. On the surface he seemed to be a crude and elemental man. Yet behind that grin she sensed a shrewd mind, a self-containment, an earthy wisdom that went to the very roots of life. Then her reluctance made her angry. Was she afraid of him? Taffeta hissed across her hips as she moved to the bar. His grin broadened.

  “Brandy?”

  “Tequila.”

  “Lemon?”

  “Salt.”

  Fencing. Always fencing. A sense of walking along a very narrow wall with a dizzying drop on either side and God knows what at the bottom.

  “Hitched up with a Crow squaw this spring,” he said.

  “Your seventh?”

  He chuckled. There was a heat to him, a wild animal smell of pinesmoke and sage and pungent dust blown across vast distances.

  “Mighty prime Yankee gals with the wagon train.”

  “Buy them a drink.”

  “Ain’t mean enough. I like my women ornery.”

  “Thank you, señor.”

  “Green-eyed too.” He leaned toward her, till their faces almost touched. “Green as hell.”

  Others were watching, puzzled, smiling. They had seen this duel before. It was becoming almost a tradition in Santa Fe. In a husky voice, Kelly said:

  “Table’s privater.”

  She thought of Perea. She smiled indolently. “And more intimate.”

  He raised his yellow brows. Then he took up both drinks and walked across the room to the small round table in the most distant corner. She followed. He hitched a chair around beside her and sprawled into it. He put his elbows on the table and leaned forward till he was looking into her eyes again. His grin was devilish.

  “Back room’s even privater.”

  “This will do.”

  “I thought my time had come.”

  “In a hundred years, Kelly.”

  He leaned back, looking at her from slitted eyes. “You can’t wait that long.”

  She picked up her glass. He picked up his. They clinked them together.

  “To my impatience,” she said. He laughed, emptied the tequila at a single gulp, squinted, made a sound like steam escaping. She took a sip, murmured, “What do you think of Captain Perea?”

  “One o’ the true girt.”

  “If he was in trouble, would you help him?”

  “Quick as I’d help Tico Velez.”

  “He’s in trouble.”

  His eyes opened wide, gazing at her. “What kind?”

  “Ryker.”

  “What’s Ryker got against Perea?”

  “I don’t know. But Perea needs help, Kelly.”

  “He can take care of himself.”

 
“Not against men like Vic Jares, Cimarron Saunders. He doesn’t know how they work. He doesn’t know how to fight dirty.”

  Kelly made a disgusted sound. He shoved his chair back and stood up. He seemed to scrape the ceiling, he looked so tall.

  “Damn you, Teresa. I told you I wouldn’t git mixed up in your dirty politics. I mean it.”

  18

  Six feet six inches in his moccasins, he walked out of the sala and onto San Francisco Street. He was filled with his frustrated need of Teresa and with anger at himself. Why did he keep coming back when he knew how it was? Why didn’t he give up? There was always greener pasture over the hill.

  He spat. Hell. He couldn’t help himself. A man wanted a woman that much he couldn’t help it. So he went on making a fool of himself.

  There was a crowd in the plaza and he skirted its edge. He came in sight of La Castrenza, the military chapel on the south side of the square. Leaning against its ancient wall were Cimarron Saunders and Wingy Hollister. They stiffened, with sight of Kelly, and for a moment all three were like strange dogs with their hackles up. This was always the way of their infrequent meetings since the fight in the mountains north of Santa Fe. Finally Saunders smiled maliciously.

  “Goin’ trappin’, Kelly?”

  “For poachers,” Kelly said.

  Wingy Hollister smiled unctuously. “A worthy search, brother. Don’t let it become an obsession.”

  “Not an obsession, exactly,” Kelly said. His eyes dropped to the tomahawk swinging from Hollister’s belt. “Jist somethin’ I can’t forget.”

  He let the drift of the crowd move him away from them toward Galisteo. Kelly was almost around the corner and into Galisteo when he saw Vic Jares join them. Cheek bulging with a chaw, the fox-faced man spoke quickly to the other pair. His bright eyes darted across the square and he gestured toward the Palace. Hollister and Saunders looked that way. Kelly did too.

  Captain Perea was talking to a ragged peon in the deep shadow of the Palace portal. He was nodding and asking questions and glancing off toward the Sangre de Cristos. In a moment Perea left the man and went to his handsome black horse hitched by the customhouse. Hollister and Jares and Saunders began walking quickly toward La Fonda. There was a definite pattern to all of it that held Kelly’s attention.

  Perea trotted his fretting cavalry horse past La Fonda and down the street that led to the Santa Fe Trail, not seeing Saunders and the other two in the crowd. As soon as Perea had disappeared, the three trappers hurried to a trio of horses racked in front of La Fonda, mounting up. They held the animals there, talking among themselves, and finally followed Perea.

  Kelly remembered what he had told Teresa. But somehow this went deeper than her politics. Somehow it was part of the debt he owed Tico Velez.

  He got his horse from its rack in the plaza and rode after the men. It was already dark when he reached the trail and traffic had thinned out to nothing. It was broken, rising land now, where the cedars and piñons clustered like stunted ghosts on the benches and the yucca stood like lonely candles in the light of a rising moon. By that same light he read sign on the trail.

  He reached Apache Pass, with rocky walls towering monumentally on either side, rising through a defile so narrow and tortuous that a few men could hold back an army here. The moon was higher now and he knew he couldn’t be far behind them. He pulled off into timber, paralleling the trail. He came to the old Pecos Trail. Here his quarry had turned off. Caution turning his face bleak, he worked his way through scrub timber. Then he heard a horse snort softly in the night ahead. He checked his animal, listening.

  After a while the horse snorted again, stamping. It was no farther ahead.

  He hitched his mount. Rifle swinging at his side, he found brush choking a wash and used it for cover. It took him to within sight of the animals. Three horses, hitched to a dwarf cedar, with no sign of their riders.

  Kelly circled them till he found the tracks of three men, leading northward. In a few hundred yards he heard another horse snort and came upon Perea’s handsome black mount, fretting nervously on its tie-rope. The tracks of Cimarron and Jares and Hollister clustered at the animal, as if they had stopped a moment; then each man had taken a different direction away from the horse. Kelly followed the deepest tracks.

  Topping a brush-covered rise, he stopped abruptly. Before him, completely revealed under the high moon, was an eery sight. Two immense communal dwellings, ancient and deserted in the pale yellow light, the crumbling remains of a vanished race.

  He realized he had been led to the ruins of Pecos, a Pueblo village whose people had been wiped out many years ago by pestilence and war. The buildings were four stories high, laid out in a quadrangle, which left a vast courtyard in the center. Typical of the pueblos, the upper stories were terraced back so that the rooftops of the lower level formed a balcony. Tico Velez had told Kelly that before the buildings had fallen into decay a man could make an entire circuit of the village on these balconies without setting foot on the ground.

  Finally he worked his way around the buildings till he found an approach that would not expose him. Squirming through the cover of washes and brush and broken land he reached the adobe wall of the first great communal building. There were breaks in the age-old wall and he climbed through one into the utter blackness of a rubble-filled chamber.

  He found no doors in the walls of this lower chamber, but his hands encountered a notched cedar post leading upward. He crawled up the primitive ladder, through an open trap, and found himself on the balcony formed by the rooftop of the first level. Fifteen feet back of the edge rose the wall of the second story. A door pierced this wall and he quickly stepped into it, feeling too exposed on the balcony.

  He stood in the doorway, looking out onto the dead city, listening. He wanted to move around the quadrangle but he didn’t dare do it in the open. He finally turned and moved through the pitch-black room, seeking another door.

  It was then that he heard the sound.

  Muffled whispering, far ahead.

  Sweat broke out on his palms. Pawing walls till he found another opening, he stepped into the next room. Moonlight streamed through a dozen breaks in the front wall. He crossed warily, flattened himself against crumbling adobe in the darkness beyond. At last he heard the sound again. Closer this time. More distinguishable. Feet crunching rubble on the floor.

  He moved down the wall to a cedar-framed door. The chamber beyond was dark again. No moonlight to show him the way. Only the sound, still muffled, intermittent, to guide him. He put his back to a rear wall and slid down it, foot by foot, feeling each time with his moccasins so they would not betray him by crunching unseen rubble. He reached a corner, stopped. This room was silent. But somewhere there was noise again. He slid down the new wall, reached another door, stopped again.

  The noise was clear now, no longer muffled. It came from the room beyond. It echoed, as if in a vast, long chamber. In complete darkness, soundless as an Indian, Kelly moved through the door and put his back to the wall. He held his breath and heard the crunching, the footsteps coming, one by one.

  A faint light bloomed against a distant wall. It looked to be a hundred feet away. So distant that it only illuminated the far end of the great chamber, revealing a few huge beams that held up the roof, leaving the bulk of the room still in darkness.

  The light became brighter, a flaring pin-point in the velvety blackness, a sotol-stalk torch held in the hand of Captain Perea as he moved into a door. The light fell on a pair of crates in a corner. Long crates, with printing on their sides.

  Perea exclaimed softly and walked quickly to the corner, saber clattering.

  From the darkness in another side of the room came a whisper of sound. Kelly stiffened. The whisper became a sharp hiss, like an arm drawn violently back.

  “Perea,” bawled Kelly.

  Pere
a wheeled. The tomahawk whipped past an inch from his chest, passing through empty air exactly where the middle of his shoulder blades would have been if he hadn’t turned. It struck the sotol stalk beyond, held in Perea’s hand, and knocked it from his grip. The torch fell to the earth and snuffed out.

  Kelly’s shout had betrayed his position. Even as the torch fell a gun began to boom in the huge room. Kelly heard the first bullet whack into the wall six inches to his right, spitting adobe all over him.

  He dropped his rifle and threw himself flat. As he rolled to escape the searching bullets, with the thunder of the smashing gun blotting out all other sound, Kelly felt the floor tremble beneath him with the feet of a heavy man running across the room toward Perea. He tried to stop himself but it was too late. The man ran right into him and spilled over his body.

  He heard the elephantine grunt as the man struck the floor. He heard him roll over and scramble up. Kelly was already lunging to his knees, whipping his Bowie from his belt. The man ran hilt-deep onto the knife and his cry of agony joined the reverberating echoes of the gunshots.

  His great weight knocked Kelly backward and then sprawled across him. The breath left Kelly in a gasp and he was helplessly pinned. The man wheezed and rolled off. Kelly still had his grip on the knife and it pulled free.

  He heard the man gasp with pain, rise, and stagger into the darkness. He lay flat, moveless, soundless, till that noise died, and the shuddering echoes of the shots faded away.

  The silence was eery, aching, after so much violent sound. It seemed like he lay there for an eternity. Finally there was a hiss of clothing on a moving body from Perea’s corner.

  “Captain?” Kelly said.

  “Who is it?”

  “Kelly Morgan.”

  “Are they gone?”

  “I think so. If they stayed, they would’ve reloaded. If they’d reloaded, we would’ve heard ‘em.”

  There was more movement, the flare of steel sparking flint, the bloom of fire from the sotol stalk again. Perea was not a fool. He stood back from the torch for a few moments, looking around the room, a pistol now in his hand. Finally he said, humbly: