Salomon 4

by David Xavier

  The prisoners sat in shadow by the time Salomon reached the transfer wagon, their backs humped to the torchlight, their faceless heads bowed. The official from Rodado nudged his horse forward.

  “I didn’t expect you would fold under pressure,” the official said. “But I was hoping you would.”

  “These villagers deserve better than to fall under their own temptations.”

  “There is still time. It is a long way to El Soldado.”

  The official was grinning. After a moment, Salomon gestured the wagon. “Get them out of my sight.”

  Vicente Valderez had become a busy scout under Major Esquibel, volunteering for many more patrols than was necessary. With five soldiers, the outpost at San Javier could be nothing more than a surveillance base and a supply station for larger patrols, the second of which had it stocked with gunpowder and musketballs, flour and cornmeal rations, and a few horses standing idle in a small corral. It required a constant guard of three soldiers at all times, which meant only two scouts went on patrol in different directions, unless the depot was empty of supplies, which had happened only twice since Vicente had arrived.

  Before each patrol, Vicente rode into San Javier and stood with the law officers and looked over the names and charges of roaming bandits.

  “The mind of a bandit is one that never rehabilitates,” the policia officer told Vicente with one arm around his shoulder. “Once a murderer, always a murderer.”

  “Even if he was a good man underneath? Even if it was not his fault for the life that happened to him?”

  “Then whose fault would it be?”

  “If it was not his, I mean.”

  “He is still guilty, is he not?” The officer pointed to his temple. “It is up here always. That mindset can flip at any time. At the worst time.”

  “Even if you know the person had no choice?”

  The officer looked at Vicente. He then pointed to a name on the ledger. “You see this man, here. He murdered a man and his wife and child as they slept. You know why he did it? Neither do we. Neither does anybody. As far as anyone knew the two men were friends and were seen together often. What sort of man has a drink with his friend, then kills him the next night? You are asking me if behavior like this changes because a man says it is so?”

  Vicente stayed silent.

  “I am not saying there are no second chances in life,” the policia officer said. “But I will say this. I would not let my mother sit at a table with a man who committed murder. Would you?”

  Vicente blinked over the names and crimes. “No.”

  Nights at the military outpost were too hot for sleep, even for the bugs that crawled the walls and the gnats that clouded the rooms in dozens or buzzed in sleeping ears. Once awake it was impossible to fall asleep again, and staring at his ceiling, an occasional swat the only indication of life, Vicente could hear the men in other rooms swing their legs off their cots and sigh in frustration. Even the animals whinnied against the heat across the yard. It was a battle every night to find a comfortable position where not only the body could relax, but the mind could shut off.

  So it was one night where Vicente was laying in his undergarments, his skin glowing blue with starlit sweat, willing himself to sleep, that a sigh from another room, though louder than normal and filled with surprise, did not startle him.

  It was the shadow that crossed his window like a wraith that brought his head off his pillow. Moments later another gasping sigh turned to a choke. Vicente sat up and reached for his pistola, and stalking across his room in his shorts, he paused with a hand at the door. The floorboards had creaked under his own movement, yet he heard nothing outside his door. After a moment he straightened and breathed again. He released the door and stepped back to his cot when he heard a man say in low voice from the next room.

  “El hombre diablo.”

  A fumbling of items followed, hands searching in the dark, and then a thump against the wall so hard that Vicente stepped back. The man screamed out but the scream cut short. Vicente pointed his pistola at his door and took a step, but stopped. Footsteps sounded and a door opened in the hallway. Candlelight spilled under Vicente’s door, and one of the outpost soldiers whispered a name. No answer, no noise.

  A shadow crossed the candlelight and a shot broke the quiet. The bullet passed through the walls and out the back of Vicente’s room. Wall plaster spiraled the moonlight and settled on Vicente’s head. On his hands and knees Vicente could see movement blotting out the candlelight like a backlit marionette show. He could hear the short metallic scrapes of a barrelrod. The soldier was reloading. The rod dropped and rolled and the pistola hammer cocked back. Then it was silent.

  “Vicente.”

  Vicente swallowed and moved his lips, but no sound came out. He tried again but did not hear a word of his reply. He stood low and stalked to the door with the pistola level.

  The soldier was not so quiet. His footsteps sounded like stomping, and Vicente heard the door next to his push open on rusty hinges, and the floorboards creaked as the soldier leaned in.

  “My God.”

  Vicente reached for his door but paused. The crack of light beneath his door went out and the candlebulb shattered, pieces scattered under his door like broken ice. The soldier cursed and the pistola went off. Vicente went to his haunches, searching his door panel for the handle like a blind man. A breeze came under, as if a body moved past on the other side, yet no footsteps sounded. The floorboards thumped under dropped weight and Vicente held still. Gunsmoke crept under his door. He stood.

  A dripping came down the hall, as if someone carried a leaky bucket. The sound held outside Vicente’s door. It came so fast that Vicente looked to his feet to see if water would come across the floor and mix with the shattered glass, but it did not. Vicente grabbed at the doorhandle and held his pistola out. A massive figure stood outside, but it was facing the door across the hall as if to enter, its back to Vicente, a back too wide for the door, a height doors were not built for. With the window at Vicente’s back, starlight caught upon the black drops from the figure’s shoulder to the floor.

  The figure turned his head, followed by the shoulders, and Vicente closed his door and backed away behind his pistola. He pulled the trigger. His door came apart in a hole the size of a cannonball and the room filled with smoke and a muffled ringing, like a church bell under a blanket. Vicente dropped the pistola and patted the shelves behind him without looking. He held still in a squat and brought his knife before him. He waited, but nothing moved. Nothing groaned, or cried out, or scrambled away. The gunsmoke seemed to suck through the hole in the door, and Vicente glanced to the window behind him, the wood panel cracked for the heat. Then the dripping in the hallway began again and a flash of movement filled the hole. The door crashed open in splinters as loud as the gunshot, and Vicente turned, putting one foot on his cot and his hands together through his window, a glassless square just wide enough for his shoulders. He rolled in the moonlit dust and came up running.

  News of the military outpost came from the San Javier policia. The soldiers at the outpost had been killed in the night, leaving only one survivor, whom they found standing in shorts at the policia doors the next morning, clutching a knife.

  “I work for you now,” the boy told the policia officers, his chest still heaving to catch his breath hours after the incident. “I want to hunt killers.”

  “He is lucky to have gotten away,” the policia told Salomon. “The scene was not pleasant to clean up.”

  Two of the outpost soldiers were found in their cots with their eyes open. The floorboards beneath them seemed to have warped in the short days it took for the patrol unit from Presidio de Loreto to arrive. A third soldier appeared to have been awake and tried for a defense before being thrown against the wall. He sat at the base of the wall with red hands fallen open on his lap. The fourth soldier lay heaped in two pieces in the hallway.

  The bodies removed, it still made José Castro cover his mou
th and stagger outside with his hands on his knees. Salomon stepped through the outpost. He crouched and looked down the hall at the flies that clung to the red walls and floorboards. He picked up one of the many pieces of the shattered door and hefted it once before dropping it. He stood in the doorway and worked the small piece of door still hanging from a hinge. The pistola was still on the floor where Vicente had dropped it. The cot in the room lay on its side, overturned by a hasty getaway, and the breeze came through the windowless square in the wall.

  Salomon turned to leave, but his eyes gripped and held on something past his elbow. On his heels he picked up a blade like no other. The bonehandle was smeared red, gripped by bloody hands, but the blade was clean, so sharp and well-crafted that it came out of its victims still shining. It stretched as long as a forearm, and although its material was common, the craftsmanship was so rare that it gleamed like a metal never before seen. It was Arturo Leyva’s blade, dropped when the pistola blasted through the door and not retrieved. Droplets of blood led down the hall and across the outpost yard, into the swaying jungle.

  “Look at this,” Salomon said in the yard.

  José Castro looked but quickly turned away and held himself over the dirt. His boots were splattered.

  “Don’t tell me that’s what did the killing.”

  “It did not swing itself.”

  “This Devil Man is a craftsman? A blacksmith?”

  Salomon shook his head. “No.”

  Castro straightened. “He has left a trail of death through Baja California. He will come through the presidio gates next.”

  “No. He won’t.”

  “He won’t? Why not?”

  “Because,” Salomon pointed. “Now he has left a trail through the leaves. I’m going to find him.”

  Salomon wore his two pistolas and tucked Arturo’s blade in his belt. A pouch of paper cartridges hung from his belt. The patrol of five including José Castro tracked the blood up a hillside, spattered and dried on the jungle floor and smeared on leaves. There were spots along the way where the bleeding man had stopped to sit upon stones or lean against trunks and bled into the earth.

  The trail followed no carved path, and made its way through vines so thick the patrol had to dismount and pull machetes. José Castro pointed at the damp earth.

  “Look at this.” He knelt over a footprint. “Just what is it we are tracking?”

  “He is just a man,” Salomon said.

  Castro looked ahead and found the next print. He took the step between them, having to hop. He shook his head.

  “We can’t take the horses any further,” Salomon said. He looked up the hillside to the gray stones at the top, the stormclouds circling above. “We’re moving too slow. This blood has not yet dried and it will rain soon.”

  He ducked under a tangle of branches and hacked his blade on the other side. José Castro and another soldier took the horses back down, while Salomon led the other two soldiers up the hillside. He stationed them upon stones where their rifles could overlook the trail.

  “If you see this man, shoot at once,” he told them. “You won’t have a second chance.”

  Salomon went ahead to the top, where dark clouds whirled like some cosmic portal overhead, and rain misted the faces of giant boulders. He removed his boots and worked his way low across the stones, pistolas in hand. The Devil Man was sitting at the top.

  With the gang disbanded, their renegade days dwindled to nothing, Tsunipu had found himself in a position against an ancient Comanche tradition that required resolving. With the expansion of populations, and the Comanche ways diminished, it was a tradition few Nemenna still considered.

  Arturo Leyva and Marquez sat with Tsunipu over one last fire, then went separate ways. Arturo headed to Baja California to pick up a hammer again as a metalworker in a quiet shop, creating one-of-a-kind knives and tools for people who had never heard of the Butcher of Monterey. He made it across the border but not much further. Marquez went toward Mexico, where sprawling cattle ranches hired men off the trail, and he could be a top hand riding through the hot dust to the fine señoritas who waved from hotel balconies.

  Before he had a chance to chase wild horses across Mexico or drop coins down the front of beautiful women’s blouses, Marquez was snatched from his campfire along the way. Tsunipu quartered him and left him trailside where the javelinas came snorting from the brush and consumed him, bones and blood.

  Arturo was not disposed of in such a complete way. Tsunipu found him dreaming in a small room in Ensenada, where he clubbed him with his bare fist until his skull caved in. In his dying hand Arturo clutched his famous blade. Tsunipu pried it from his grip and kept it. During the night, while the children who would later find the body slept in their beds, Tsunipu dragged Arturo through the streets, past the open windows, at the end of a rope and threw him in Salsipuedes Bay, where he would wash up on shore days later like the bloated, fed upon carcasses of seals.

  The Demon Indian then searched California for Salomon Pico. During the following months he sat fireside with Comanches, men who watched the land and saw people come and go, and knew every story. Tsunipu stood in the orchard groves where Salomon once chased Marisela in the dark. He sat rocking in the darkness in the chair by the fireplace in the empty hacienda outside of San Diego, the smell of Pío Pico’s cigars long ago embedded in the walls and floor.

  Tsunipu traced Salomon south, into Baja California, where there was no trail to follow, but only a notion of Salomon joining the Mexican Army under the recommendation of his powerful cousins, in a frontier where his name was unknown, his reputation unheard. He asked natives along the way who knew more about their land and its inhabitants than any official wearing a blue hat would ever find out in a thousand patrols. They told of a famous bandit, now a soldier.

  Tsunipu followed Army patrols from missions, from outposts. He could not tell the officers apart, and Salomon would have changed his appearance, wearing a full beard, or shaving every morning. He drifted through campsites. He broke into guarded gates. He cut their throats in the night with the blade of the Butcher.

  “Why?” Salomon asked him now, months later atop the hill. Overhead, the clouds rotated in a way that one could not tell if it was the clouds that twirled above, or the earth that spun below. He squatted on his heels, a dozen yards from where Tsunipu sat. “Why did you kill Arturo and Marquez?”

  Tsunipu looked up. He was seated on a stone over a smokeless flame, bleeding through his fingers at his side, a gaping wound from Vicente’s pistolshot days prior. Tsunipu made an odd gesture.

  “Kehetu,” he said. “The Nemenna, the people. Our idea of solitude from other people. Kehetu. Zero. If you are unknown on earth, you are free to travel the afterlife. But if a man without Nemenna blood knows your living flesh, he will permit you from the spiritworld until he breathes his last.”

  “Do all Comanche believe that?”

  “It is a vanishing concept. It was only after they left, and I was alone, that I felt the weight of their association.”

  “But you are well-known. The Demon Indian. The Devil Man.”

  “People know of a man, but they do not know me. Only three men knew me. Now only one.”

  Salomon stood. He held his hands loose at his sides. Tsunipu nodded.

  “You found Arturo’s knife.” He looked to the small flames, sputtering in the mist. “In death he is your protector. No harm shall come to you without crossing his blade first.”

  The Demon Indian turned his dark eyes to Salomon. They had changed in their appearance. The glint of life was no longer there so they looked black like the eyes of a shark before they roll back. Salomon gripped his pistolas and eased them from their holsters. A small smile moved Tsunipu’s mouth. Then he was on his feet.

  The ground between the Comanche and Salomon was a matter of steps. He came at him quickly, the muscles on his shoulders and chest moving beneath his skin like the muscles of a horse. Salomon held and cocked the pistola hammers an
d fired once then twice. The Comanche lurched both times as two red blooms appeared close on his chest. But he did not stop. His eyes did not close.

  Salomon dropped the guns and pulled Arturo’s knife and went to a squat. When he came up again he held the blade buried in Tsunipu’s heart and the two staggered together. His hands went warm and wet and Salomon realized the screams that bounced across the wet boulders were his own. A shudder of final life, or a shudder of death beginning, went through Tsunipu’s body, and he fell to his knees and clutched Salomon by the shoulders with hands still filled with power. He spoke in a Comanche tongue, not a fevered curse from possessed cords, but rather a blessing from dying lips. Then his eyes closed a final time and moved behind the lids as if already in eternal dream, his hands dropped to hang at his sides, and his body fell back to lay lifeless beneath the whirling clouds.

  After the murders of his soldiers, José Castro did not repopulate the outpost at San Javier. Instead, he requested Comandante General José Antonio Carrillo of the Mexican Army for the services of a competent officer with a proven record. Comandante Carrillo was broad and darkbrowed and when he stood shirtless to shave each morning in a tiny mirror his chest showed the dark circles of old gunshot wounds he received in the Siege of Los Angeles during the Mexican-American War, and another purple mark across his chest where an American soldier slashed at him at the Battle of Dominguez Rancho. He read Colonel Castro’s request and an hour later he sent his best officer.

  Capitán Feliciano Ruiz de Esparza arrived in a brushed uniform and polished boots, as if he had stopped outside San Javier and taken the time to step out of the dust and mud from the ride before walking into the offices on marching legs, stomping his heels in place and raising a salute to his brow.

  Capitán Esparza was given authority over the San Javier policia to keep the frontier peaceful, and he took his mission seriously: to rid la frontera of all outlaws. He paced before his officers and eyed them under furrowed brows. He spoke in textbook passages.