The Cost of Dying

by Peter Brandvold

  Miguel stopped, frowning at the old don, who had turned his head to stare off across the yard as though collecting his thoughts. The don was turned away from Prophet, but the bounty hunter thought the old man’s eyes were squeezed shut. The don’s shoulders shook. He lowered his chin nearly to his chest and drew a ragged breath.

  “Papa?” Marisol asked him, tentatively. She glanced with concern at Miguel, who returned her look. She looked at Lou, who gave a noncommittal shrug.

  Don Amador appeared to be sobbing. Why? Surely not over the death of Juan Carlos. He must be enduring another wave of grief for his sister.

  But, no. Wait.

  The old man lifted his chin and turned toward Prophet. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. Not tears of sorrow, however. They were tears of laughter. He drew another, even more ragged breath and pointed at Prophet and then to the dead man still being held, suspended above the ground by the four straining vaqueros.

  “The gringo,” he said through his breathless laughter, leaning on one crutch while raising his other arm to point at the bounty hunter, “he . . . he killed Juan Carlos! The norteamericano . . . ha-hah!—he comes down here . . . and . . . hah-hah-hah!—he shoots that no-good walking louse—hahhh!—of a misbegotten Amador through his black heart—the very thing I have wanted to do for the past twenty years! Ohhhh-ha-ha-ha-hah-hah-hah!”

  He laughed almost violently, sort of wheezing and making choking sounds, leaning forward to slap his thigh. His left crutch slipped out from under his arm and Miguel quickly grabbed it, staring in shock at the old don, who was laughing so hysterically that he appeared on the verge of a stroke.

  The old don’s laughter was infectious. Miguel looked at him, a smile building slowly on his mustached mouth until suddenly he was leaning back and throwing loud guffaws at the heavens. He, too, pointed at Prophet and then at Juan Carlos and laughed even louder. Then his men started laughing until they were having even more trouble than before keeping the heavy, dead burden of Juan Carlos above the ground.

  Prophet glanced a little uneasily, self-consciously, at Señorita Marisol and was somewhat surprised to see that even she had broken out in laughter. She covered her mouth with one hand and looked at him, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  That made Prophet feel even more self-conscious and truly bewildered, not entirely sure what everyone was laughing about. He looked over his shoulder at Colter, who appeared as taken aback by the scene as he himself was. Then Colter spread a smile of his own. The redhead chuckled and then he was laughing, too, albeit not with quite as much unrestrained vigor as the Mexicans, but laughing just the same.

  Suddenly, the four men holding Juan Carlos let the body slip out of their weakening hands. The cadaver dropped to the ground with a hard thud, dust puffing up around it.

  That stopped the laughter cold. Everyone looked down in shock at Juan Carlos staring up at them through half-closed lids, tongue sort of lolling against one corner of his mouth. He looked like a man so drunk he’d passed out with his eyes open.

  Several seconds of absolute silence passed. Even the birds seemed to stop piping in the fruit trees.

  Staring down at the body, Don de la Paz gave a snort. Then another, louder snort.

  He threw his head back on his shoulders, laughing wildly once more.

  The others snorted, as well, and then they all were once more rocking with ribald guffaws. They were all laughing so hard, even Colter now, that Prophet himself couldn’t help becoming infected. He gave a snort and then threw his own head back, bellowing laughter at the sky. Even as he laughed, he had the strange, unsettling feeling he was laughing at the prospect of his own funeral, but he went on laughing, anyway.

  When they were finally all laughed out, and chuckled out, and had wiped the tears from their eyes, Miguel said to the don, a tone of wariness returning to his voice: “Patrón, the shit is really going to fly when Don Amador gets wind of his son’s demise.” That wasn’t what he said exactly; it was Prophet’s rough translation in terms he himself could best understand.

  The don stared down at the dead man. The old hacendado also appeared a little rocked back on his heels again by the dark turn of events. “Sí, sí. Juan Carlos wasn’t much, but he was the old puma’s only child. Hmmm.” He fingered his chin whiskers as he continued staring down at the deceased.

  The don wrapped his free arm around Miguel’s neck. “I tell you what we’ll do. You’ll do, rather, Miguel.”

  “¿Qué?”

  “I want you to throw a blanket around Juan Carlos and lay him out in a wagon . . .”

  “¡Sí, sí, patrón!”

  “And then you and a half-dozen men of your choosing drive Juan Carlos over to Hacienda del Amador. Wrap white cloths of truce to your rifles. Politely inform Don Amador of what happened—that Juan Carlos was caught trying to ravage my older daughter and swallowed a pill he couldn’t digest”—he chuckled devilishly then swiped his fist across his nose—“only, possibly not in those exact words!”

  He chuckled again as he cut a glance at Prophet, who felt a dark worm of dread turn in his belly.

  The don leaned close to Miguel to whisper in his segundo’s ear. While he talked, Miguel frowned and nodded, both men cutting several quick, meaningful glances at Prophet, who again felt that black worm writhe around in his gut.

  “Okay, Miguel?” said the don, pulling his head back from the segundo and patting his shoulder. “Do you have all that? Everything should be fine. For whatever differences we have, Don Amador and myself, we are men of honor and mutual respect. He will see how Juan Carlos’s killing has been the result of a sad misunderstanding, one that has resulted in a tragic loss for each of us, and that there is no reason for further conflict.”

  Looking a little like he’d swallowed rat poison, Miguel handed the don’s crutch back to him. The don slipped it under his arm. Miguel glanced at his men, who regarded him dubiously, warily, then sprang into action when the segundo ordered them to stop standing there like they were men of leisure and to pick up Juan Carlos and haul him over to the wagon barn.

  “¡Vamos!” intoned Miguel, taking out his sudden case of biliousness on his men. “¡Vamos! You heard the don! ¡Vamos! ¡Vamos!”

  Just then, the vaqueros who’d carried Tía Aurora into the casa came out. The don ordered two to unload his daughter’s and sister’s belongings from the carriage and to take them inside. He ordered the other two to take the carriage back to the wagon barn and to unhitch the team. He told them that at first light of the next day they were to take a wagon out and pick up the dead men from Marisol’s traveling party.

  Colter had climbed down out of the carriage by now, and, as the don’s men hurried about their business, soon leaving only himself, Marisol, Prophet, Colter, and the mayordomo standing just outside the wrought iron gate to the courtyard, the don turned to his guests.

  “It has been a sad day,” said the don. “I think we could all do with a few drinks and a hearty meal. Por favor, amigos—¡mi casa, tu casa!”

  “Ah, that’s all right, don,” Prophet said, feeling as though it might be a good idea to make himself scarce sooner rather than later. “We don’t want to put you out, Colter an’ me. We’ll just be foggin’ the sagebrush.”

  “Nonsense!” said the don. “I insist! You saved mi hija’s life.” He leaned over and pressed his lips to Marisol’s forehead. “The least I can do is stuff you full of good wine and food before you resume your journey. Besides . . .” The don lowered his voice conspiratorially. “I have something to discuss with you both. A most important matter, in fact.”

  “Oh?” Lou said, suddenly curious despite his compulsion to light a shuck.

  “Sí, sí—¡por favor!” The don jerked his chin to indicate the casa.

  Prophet hesitated. Staying on here seemed like an even less favorable idea when he saw Marisol regarding her father with brows furled warily, suspiciously.

  “¡Por favor!” the don said again, insisting.

  Prophet lo
oked at Colter. The redhead shrugged.

  “All right,” Prophet said.

  He and Colter followed Marisol into the courtyard, the don trudging along behind them on his crutches, like the grim reaper with a hitch in his gait.

  Chapter 16

  “Pulque?” asked the don. “I ferment it myself right here at Hacienda de la Paz. Er . . . I should say my peons ferment it, but under my close supervision, of course.” Holding up a slender, brown stone jug he’d removed from the top of a heavy wooden cabinet beneath a framed, painted map of Baja, the old patrón smiled at his guests.

  Prophet salivated. “That’s one of the two things that calls me to Mexico year after year.”

  The don switched his gaze to Colter, raising the jug a little higher and arching a brow. Colter glanced sheepishly at Prophet, flushing.

  “Red don’t imbibe, Don,” the bounty hunter answered for the younger man. “He’s still—”

  “What do you mean I don’t imbibe?” Shifting uncomfortably in the big, deep leather chair he’d dropped into when the don had invited them into his personal library for presupper drinks, Colter beetled his brows at his new partner, as though he’d never heard anything so silly. He looked at the don and curled his upper lip in an ironic smile. “Lou’s just sore ’cause he knows I can drink him under the table. Sure, fill ’er up, Don. I got a mouthful of trail dust beggin’ to be cut.”

  “Kid,” Prophet said under his breath and with a wooden grin. “There’s no shame in—”

  “No shame in what, Lou?” Colter shifted around again. “No shame in throwing back too much busthead and howling at the moon? Pshaw! I can hold my liquor.” He smiled at the don. “Even the black powder variety you brew down here in Méjico.”

  “All right.” Prophet dropped his arms to the sides of his own leather chair. “It’s your head, El Rojo.”

  “All right, then.” The don glanced at his mayordomo standing just inside the open door. “Raoul, three pulques, if you will.”

  “Sí,” said Raoul, a straight-backed, elegant-looking old Mexican with a carefully trimmed gray mustache. The don placed a hand on the servant’s shoulder and whispered into his ear.

  As he did, Colter turned to Prophet again, and said under his breath with more than a little indignation, “What do you think I’m gonna do—sit here and drink goat’s milk like a blame nancy boy while you two swill Mexican busthead and compare knife scars and scorpion bites? This is Mexico, Lou!”

  Prophet shrugged and sat back in his chair.

  While the mayordomo, Raoul, walked over to the liquor cabinet, the don got both his crutches under him and ambled over to a chair near where Prophet and Colter had parked themselves at angles before the small fire snapping and crackling in a deep stone hearth. The library was a testament to old Spanish wealth—opulence that had gone somewhat to seed, however. The furniture was stately and Old Mexican in the best Spanish tradition, and the full armor of a Spanish conquistador was mounted on a wooden pedestal beside the fireplace, complete with jewel-encrusted sword.

  But the leather furniture was badly cracked, the seams frayed. Wooden chair arms were splintering and showing the wear of the ages. In fact, most of the wood in the room, and there was a great deal including that of heavy shelves bearing the weight of hundreds of handsome cloth- or leather-bound Spanish volumes, had long since lost its luster.

  There were patches of dust here and there, in hard-to-reach places, and cobwebs hung like tangled threads in wall corners. The heavy drapes thrown back from two long, arched windows, open to the cool night air and citrus aromas wafting from the surrounding patio, owned their own patina of dirt and soot from the fireplace.

  Not that Prophet put any stock in neatness and maintenance himself, but the shabbiness, which he’d spied in other parts of the grand old house as he and Colter had been led here from the front entrance, spoke to him of better days at Hacienda de la Paz. Of younger housekeepers, perhaps, a younger don better equipped to stay on top of such supervision, and no doubt an overseeing lady of the place who had long since passed on.

  Seeing that the don was having trouble with his crutches, Lou rose to help, taking the crutches from the old man, easing him into a chair near himself and Colter, at the end of a low table, then leaning the crutches against the man’s heavy leather armchair.

  “Gracias, amigo,” the don said as he sank back in his chair, a little breathless. “It is no good—getting old.”

  “I don’t look forward to it,” Prophet said.

  The don looked at Colter. “You are still quite young.”

  “I reckon in years, Don.”

  “You feel older, eh?” The don fingered his left cheek. “Maybe it has something to do with the scar, eh?”

  “Maybe.”

  “La Marca de Sapinero.” Keeping his eyes on Colter, the old don gave a grim, knowing smile. “Sheriff Bill Rondo’s brand.”

  Colter frowned at him in astonishment. “You know . . .”

  “Sí, sí.” On the table before the don were three short stacks of reading material—books, magazines, and dime novels with yellow pasteboard covers. He leaned forward and with his arthritic hand riffled through a couple of the stacks, knocking the books around the table. “I try to brush up on my English from time to time by reading books from America. In my old age, I have wearied of the more serious fair”—he tossed a heavy, cloth-bound volume aside—“and indulge myself with more romantic tales of derring-do on the wild ’n’ woolly American frontier. Ah, here it is . . .”

  He plucked a slender pasteboard volume from a now-messy stack and shoved it across the table toward Colter. The redhead stared down at it, deep lines cut across his forehead, pale where his hat had shaded it from the sun.

  Leaning forward, Colter plucked it off the table and held it up so Prophet could see the cover on which a crude drawing showed a slender, long-haired young man bearing down on three obvious curly wolves with exaggeratedly savage faces. The young man wore a grisly S on his left cheek. He held a pistol in his left hand, flames stabbing from the barrel. One of the cutthroats facing him was thrown off his feet by the bullet. One man still standing wore a big silver star and held a gun in one hand, a branding iron in his other hand.

  The brand on the end of the iron was a large, bright-red S.

  The title in large dramatic letters read: THE SAPINERO BRAND.

  Below, in smaller letters: The redheaded gunslinger wore the Brand of Sapinero on his face . . . or was it the Mark of Satan? The man who branded him found out for sure—the hard way!

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Prophet said. “Kid, you’ve ridden into dime-novel country.”

  Colter scraped his thumb across the edge of the book, riffling the pages. “Reckon I have at that.” He didn’t seem quite sure how he felt about it.

  “Just like Louisa,” Prophet groused. The Vengeance Queen, too, had had a dime novel written about her. “Me,” Prophet said, wryly, “all I get is shot at!”

  “Ah, you are famous in your own right, Señor Prophet,” said the don. Raoul had given the old patrón a stone mug of pulque, and it quivered now in the oldster’s shaking hands. Raoul had set mugs of the astringent Mexican liquor on the low table near Prophet and Colter, and then after a quick nod to his patrón, retreated from the room. The don smiled around the mug he held up close to his spade-bearded chin. “Or, shall we say, infamous?”

  “That’d likely be a better word—you’re right on that score, Don,” Prophet growled, lifting the mug and taking a small sip of the liquor.

  The don sipped his own brew then smiled over the lip of the mug. “The big ex-Confederate bounty hunter who sold his soul to the devil . . .”

  “I see my reputation precedes me, as well.”

  “I read about you in a book about the Vengeance Queen.”

  Prophet laughed. “Ain’t it just like her to get most of the glory.”

  “You are her partner, are you not, Señor Prophet?”

  “She’s mine. When I feel
like indulging her persnickety ways, that is.”

  The don frowned curiously, sliding his glance between Lou and Colter. “But, now . . . you two are partners . . . ?”

  “For the time bein’,” Prophet told him.

  “We found ourselves in similar situations, you might say,” Colter explained before taking a tentative sip of the pulque. He swallowed and his cheeks instantly flushed but he tried not to grimace.

  He shot a quick glance at Prophet, who hooked a half smile at him.

  “I see, I see,” said the don, studying each man in turn.

  The man’s stare made Prophet feel like a horse the man was thinking about making an offer on. Apparently, the don’s scrutiny made Colter uneasy, as well, for the redhead glanced again at Prophet, this time with a question in his eyes.

  After a long, uneasy silence, the don turned to Prophet. “You said, señor, that there were two things that lured you to Méjico. One was pulque. And the other . . . ?”

  As if to dramatize the bounty hunter’s response, there was a soft knock on the library door. Not waiting for a response, Señorita Marisol poked her head into the room to say, “Papa, Seville wanted me to ask if you would like corn or beans with the birria.” She must have seen the three regarding her with a bemused half smile, for she froze there, frowning curiously back at them.

  Prophet’s heart did a little Indian dance in his chest. Marisol looked even more beautiful now than before. She must have bathed after the long journey, for her heart-shaped face had a fresh-scrubbed look, enhancing its rich earthy tones, and her hair still showed a little dampness. She wore it down now, tucked behind her ears and spilling down her shoulders; it shone with a recent brushing. It was as rich and glossy as her eyes.