The Cost of Dying

by Peter Brandvold

  He cast his gaze at Lou again, and then at Colter, and again curiosity shone in his eyes. “So, tell me, gentlemen—what brings you to Mexico?” He blinked once then gave a shrewd, lopsided smile as he added, “Me, perhaps?”

  A snake hidden in the regal old sofa’s musty cushions slithered up through a crack to lick the base of Prophet’s spine. At least, that’s what it felt like. A momentary chill hit him despite the fire crackling in the hearth.

  He didn’t look at Colter, but in the corner of his eye, he saw the redhead fidget slightly in his chair, bringing his knees a little closer together and reaching down to finger the brim of his Stetson.

  “You?” Prophet said, frowning. “I don’t understand.”

  He’d be damned if he hadn’t sounded sincere. At least to his own ears.

  Yeats looked at the coal of his stogie again. “As you must know, being americanos and all, I have quite a high bounty on my head back north in the States and territories. The last I heard, it was right up around five thousand dollars. That’s a lot of dinero for most men. Believe me . . .”

  He paused to take a shallow drag on the cylinder then, blowing it out, said in a pinched voice, “I’ve had men after me.” He paused to rid his lungs of the smoke then spoke in a normal, level tone of voice, smiling. “This was a few years ago, back when I was easier to track down. As my legend has grown down here in Baja, the wise country folks, salts of the earth, have learned not to bandy my name about overmuch. Bad things have been known to happen when they do. More than a few have lost their tongues, in fact. Those were the more fortunate ones.”

  Yeats smiled proudly at that.

  “As for the bounty hunters who came after me,” he continued, still smiling, quite pleased with himself, “their heads ended up used as kick balls for the children down in the village. Oh, what a novelty for them, as you can imagine!”

  He slapped his thigh and had an overlong laugh at that.

  He sobered abruptly and shuttled his penetrating gaze between Lou and Colter and said, “So . . . is it the bounty you’re after? Shall I reward the village children with two more balls for their kick games?”

  Prophet couldn’t contain a grimace.

  “Nah, nah, Major—them two ain’t after you.” Baja Jack had just followed Will-John Rhodes back into the room. He held a sizable buckskin pouch in his right hand and was hefting it happily. “I’ll vouch for Lou and Colter my ownself. They work for me, don’t ya know. After I ran into ’em along the trail, I sorta figured they might be cut out for guardin’ my weed runs. It’s hard to get good help these days. Hell, most gunnies would rather prey on me than ride guard for me. After ole Proph there pounded Gato’s head so far down between his shoulders it coulda served as a lamp table, I made it official.”

  Jack smiled, a tad shrewdly, from Lou to Colter and back again. “Didn’t I, boys?”

  Lou stared back at him, suspicion buzzing around his ear like a pesky fly. What was Jack up to? Not that Lou minded, of course. Louisa had planted in his mind the well-founded suspicion that Jack, realizing that Lou and Colter were hunting Yeats, his primary patron, might have been leading the two americanos into a trap.

  That suspicion was now replaced with another one. Why was Jack lying on Prophet and the redhead’s behalf?

  Lou and Colter shared another quick, conferring glance and then Prophet cleared his throat and, turning to Yeats, said, “That’s right, Major. Why would we wanna do a fool thing and take down a golden goose like yourself ?”

  “That’s right,” Colter said. “If you kill the cow, no more milk!”

  Everybody, including Lou, furled their brows at him.

  Colter flushed, shrugged, and brushed his fist across his chin. “I mean . . . in a manner of speakin’ . . .”

  Yeats studied him closely, suspiciously.

  Finally, his thick lips spread inside his tangled, gray-red beard, and he chuckled. He turned to Lieutenant Rhodes standing near where Jack stood staring lustily down at the two clay ollas filled with tangleleg. Yeats said, “Why don’t you roll my guests a stogie each, so they can sample Jack’s wonderful ganja? Jack, too, of course.”

  “Oh, now—that’s okay, Major,” Jack said, raising his hands, palms out. “I’ll stay clear. I done sampled the batch when I was concocting this potent variety just for you, and it done made me howl at the moon for hours on end.” He chuckled uneasily and rubbed his hands up and down on his leather vest.

  “Nonsense,” Yeats insisted, glancing again at Rhodes. “A stogie for each of my guests, if you will, please, Lieutenant?”

  “Comin’ right up, Major.” Rhodes walked over to the table where the panniers were stacked.

  Prophet was about to protest. He’d tried marijuana a few times when he’d been down here in Mexico, and all it had done was turn him into an even bigger fool than he already was. But he had a feeling his protest, like Jack’s, would fall on deaf ears. So he said nothing. Neither did Colter. Lou saw that the redhead wore a wary look.

  Jack looked at Lou. The little man raised his arms in a shrug as though in apology. Lou wasn’t sure exactly what he was apologizing for, but after he’d taken a few puffs off the stogie, he realized exactly what the apology had been about.

  The marijuana was potent. Not at first. At first, it was like riding an old mare in a leisurely lope across a grassy field. It filed all the edges off a fella’s tender consciousness. It made Lou feel very calm and relaxed, and it made the world around him seem uncommonly friendly and beautiful, warm and inviting, with the peace of an old church and the charms of a beautiful, sexy woman.

  It made him want to keep puffing the damn stuff until too late he realized the mare he was riding was in fact an unbroke bronco broom tail cayuse, wild as a wolf and bred for hard mountain riding.

  Prophet didn’t realize this until several hours after he’d started smoking the stuff, chasing it with the mezcal. He and Colter and Baja Jack and the Mad Major and Will-John Rhodes all dined together on a simple but hearty meal, which was just the right padding a man needed after so many days on the trail. The Mexican-spiced goat meat and frijoles and steaming tortillas went down just fine, accompanied as it all was with more and more mezcal and then the sangria Yeats ordered one of the girls to bring up from the cellar.

  The first of the evening was filled with much boisterous conversation and ribald laughter, with the señoritas serving the men at the long table and acting very flirty and teasing and sexy in their low-cut, sleeveless, brightly embroidered dresses that left their brown legs and feet bare.

  Prophet talked and laughed with bunkhouse abandon, and so did Colter. They both forgot all about the reason they’d come here and about Alejandra de la Paz, as well. All their tension and anxiety about the mission thinned out and disappeared like fog on a quiet morning pond. They were in a room full of new friends enjoying good food, good drink, and the flashing eyes of the young Mexican serving girls.

  It was after the long meal, which must have lasted a good three hours or more, finally wound down and Will-John Rhodes rolled more marijuana cigarettes, that Prophet’s mare made the unlikely transformation. It pitched and whinnied and buck-kicked and took him running off across the violent waves of the evening.

  The stallion had no saddle or bridle. All Lou could do was grab two fistfuls of mane and hold on.

  Much of the rest of the night was a chaotic dream with only sporadic moments of fleeting lucidity. He remembered more girls coming into the Mad Major’s apartment—fresh girls who were apparently hazed up here each evening from the village, like a gaggle of young geese. Lou wasn’t sure who they were—if they were kidnapped girls from around Baja whom Yeats had forced into his despicable slavery, or if they were girls from the near village he’d forced into the same.

  Lou didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything except holding on to the bronco’s mane while the stallion carried him up hill and over dale of his rarefied debauch.

  He had another vague, short-lived moment of clarity
when he was singing along with several señoritas while he himself was strumming a mandolin, albeit crudely. (He hadn’t known he could play the mandolin even crudely.) There were other such moments when his head bobbed above the waves of intoxication, as when he realized he was stumbling out through the open front gate of the bastion, each arm draped around the neck of a young señorita, each of whom was laughing and stumbling and trying feebly to keep the big man on his feet. (He had the vague sense that the bastion was always open and guarded only sparingly. Yeats must have felt confident that no one would be fool enough to try to infiltrate his ancient garrison.)

  Time stopped again. Or maybe it sped up. He became aware mainly of sensations—the brush of a girl’s hair against his cheek, warm lips pressed to his, more drink rolling over his tongue and down his throat. At one point he found himself stumbling through shadowy alleys that stank of privies and trash, and he had no idea how he’d gotten there or where he was going.

  Dogs barked.

  An old woman cajoled him loudly from the doorway of a mud jacal in rattling Spanish.

  A señorita laughed madly.

  Then he was in the salty ocean surf, naked as God had made him, and he thought he was making love though he wasn’t sure. It felt like that for a time, but then he was alone and it was dawn and the sun was a bloodred rose rising out of the polished glass table of the Sea of Cortez.

  He gathered his clothes, dressed, and stumbled back through the morning-quiet village to the bastion, dead windblown palm fronds blowing against his ankles. Seagulls shrieked in the rookery for breakfast, diving at the water behind him.

  That day passed, and another evening that somehow transpired just as the previous one had. It was as though he were sucked into a whirlpool of wanton desire and a revolving intoxication, laughing, singing, having long, seemingly meaningful conversations with Ciaran Yeats or Colter or Baja Jack or some pretty girl who spoke slowly and helped him with his Spanish . . .

  More food. More drink. More puffs of Baja Jack’s relentlessly addictive marijuana, which, despite its eventual sledgehammer effects, also made the world make sense somehow and become what every man and every woman from the beginning of time had wanted it to be . . .

  And then there was a night of sudden, strange lucidity. He wasn’t sure where it came in relation to his coming to Baluarte Santiago. It could have been the third or fourth night, or the four hundredth night, for all he knew.

  He opened his eyes and saw a lovely, redheaded woman in a diaphanous white gown step up to him from the rolling shadows of the seashore. Lou was on his knees in the surf, naked, his clothes bobbing around him in the lacy waves edged with sparkling foam.

  He’d been laughing uncontrollably. He’d remembered a young puta being there with him, but she was gone now, it seemed. There was only the redheaded goddess standing over him, staring down at him. Starlight sparkled in her filmy gown, which seemed made entirely of starlight reflected off the water, as the wind buffeted about her long, bare legs.

  Her red hair danced in the wind. The moon cast silver streaks into it and reflected off her dark, almond-shaped eyes.

  “You have to help me,” she said. “Will you help me?”

  She dropped to her knees in the surf beside him, wrapped an arm around his shoulders. In Spanish-accented English she said, “You have to help me, Mr. Prophet,” she begged. “Won’t you please help me?”

  Chapter 37

  Prophet stared up at her, aghast. Her face was like that of a marble statue in a moonlit garden at midnight. Classical. Mysterious. Mythical in its worldly anguish.

  Enthralling.

  Lou reached up and gently placed his hand on it, lightly ran his thumb across the nub of her cheek, as though to prove to himself that she was really here, that she wasn’t just another concoction of his inebriated imagination.

  “Ale . . . Alejandra . . . ?”

  “Yes.” She placed her hand on his. “Yes, I’m Alejandra. Will you help me, Mr. Prophet? He can’t, you see. He can’t help me. I . . . I very much need your help.”

  “Yes.” Prophet smiled. He’d found her at last! Or . . . she’d found him. “Yes, I’ll help you.”

  She squeezed his hand. “Come.”

  “Wait. Now?”

  “Yes, now. ¡Vamos, por favor! Hurry—you must!”

  “All right.” Lou looked around at his soaked clothes rolling in the surf.

  “I’ll go ahead,” the girl said. “So no one suspects us.

  “All . . . right . . .”

  Then she was gone as abruptly as she’d materialized. He turned to stare after her, wanting to reassure himself that she was real. Don’t fall in love with her, Marisol had warned him. Now he knew why she’d been worried. He felt that he’d already tumbled for the bewitching, red-haired goddess of the Sea of Cortez!

  He could see her tall, lithe figure in the blowing gauzy dress drift away from him and the rolling wavelets. She was lifting the soaked hem of the long dress halfway up her bare legs, just above her knees. Her long legs were slender and supple and the color of alabaster.

  No wonder Yeats had chosen her and secreted her away here at Baluarte Santiago, keeping her all for himself . . .

  Lou gathered his clothes. He started to pull on his summer longhandles then nixed the idea. He was too drunk to go through the labor of pulling on the sopping duds. He’d walk naked back to the bastion.

  Most of the village was likely asleep by now, and most of the debauchers in the bastion were likely three sheets to the wind. Aside from the guards, but they’d likely seen more than their share of debauchery and partaken in enough of it, as well, when they’d not been on guard duty. They wouldn’t be overly shocked to see a naked man walking through the bastion’s open gate.

  Prophet walked barefoot along the trail through the village. He wasn’t accustomed to walking barefoot, of course, but few rocks or thorns grieved him. Likely the nerves in his feet as elsewhere were still dead from all the liquor he’d drunk and the locoweed he’d smoked.

  For a time, he could see the vague, pale figure of Alejandra walking ahead of him, but then she stretched the distance between them and disappeared into the darkness. When he mounted the stone ramp, he could feel the eyes of guards on him though he could not see them up there in the darkness capped by a sky full of stars. He heard a couple of men chuckle mockingly at him as he passed over the bridge and tramped on into the compound in which a couple of cookfires glowed softly, men slumped around them in drunken slumber.

  The bastion itself loomed before him—hulking and massive, like a large pale mountain of granite.

  He stopped, looked around, frowning.

  Where was the girl? His blood quickened desperately, fearful he’d lost her or, worse, that she’d been spawned only by Baja Jack’s locoweed.

  “Pssst! Señor!”

  He jerked his head in the direction from which the raspy call had come. She was a pale smudge in the darkness ahead and on his left. Leaning out from a heavy shadow, she beckoned.

  Clutching his clothes before him, his shell belt, Peacemaker, and bowie knife looped over his arm, he hurried his pace. His legs and feet felt spongy from all the drink. He stumbled, nearly fell, and dropped his hat. He cursed as he stooped to pick it up and then continued walking as quickly as he could to where he’d last seen the girl though she’d disappeared again now, swallowed by the shadows of the massive masonry building.

  As he approached the hulking castlelike structure, he saw a small, arched doorway near the far-left end. She reappeared in the doorway, again beckoning. “Come quickly! ¡Rápido!”

  Prophet strode quickly to her. She grabbed his arm and pulled him into the entrance’s deep shadows, gave a husky laugh, wrapped her arms around his neck, and kissed him.

  Her lips were warm and as smooth as silk.

  His heart hammered.

  She gave another husky chuckle, then wheeled. “Come, come! We’ve no time to waste. It will be dawn soon!”

  She wheeled
and moved quickly into a corridor, and Prophet followed her heavily on his bare feet, not sure where they were going or what they were doing. Surely, she didn’t think he could take her away from here tonight. One, he was in no condition. Two, they hadn’t prepared horses . . . trail supplies . . .

  These were vague concerns fluttering through his brain. More powerful was the allure of the girl herself. Even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t have done anything except follow her down a cold stone corridor then up a flight of stone stairs, stubbing his toes as he climbed. They tramped down another corridor.

  He could hear the slap of the girl’s bare feet ahead of him, the soft crunch of the sand clinging to the soles. He could hear her breathing. Occasionally, she chuckled—a soft, earthy, almost musical sound of barely restrained emotion.

  They came to another doorway. She pushed through a heavy wooden door and into a room lit by two small arched windows through which milky moonlight angled.

  “Here we are,” she said, whirling toward him, wrapping her arms around his neck, and pressing her supple body against his. “Here we are, my love. Help me! Por el amor de todos los santos en el cielo, por favor ¡sálvame de este desierto!”

  Prophet’s slow-working brain translated the plea as “For the love of all the saints in heaven, please save me from this desert!”

  She rose up onto her bare toes and kissed him again, hungrily, flicking her tongue between his lips. Passion hammered at him. “I will, Alejandra,” he groaned. “I will . . . but . . .”

  She grabbed his hand and wheeled. He dropped his clothes and his gun on the floor as she led him over to a massive bed that appeared to be one of the large room’s few furnishings.

  It was soon apparent that all the help she wanted at the moment was his help in her bed.

  In his current stare of intoxication and raging passion, who was he to deny this young siren anything?

  * * *

  Sunlight woke him. He could see it through his eyelids.